Hi folks, I don't think that I should file this as a Debian bugreport, because it's not a problem that I've experienced with Debian.
And I don't think that it's appropriate to write to Debian developers directly about it yet, because I haven't been able to test the results of what I'm curious about here. However: my understanding is that the Geode LX is basically an i686 CPU that lacks one instruction (a 'no operation' - noop - called NOPL). There's a long and entertaining writeup about that here: https://www.jookia.org/wiki/Nopl It's an unusual CPU and didn't see wide consumer adoption except within the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, where it was used for two of the early laptop models (XO 1.0 and XO 1.5). Recently, Intel has begun proposing some security improvements for i686 that make use of the NOPL instruction -- and that, I think, could cause support for the Geode LX to fall away from many Linux operating systems because there's a fair and very reasonable argument that adding security features for the majority of users outweighs supporting an old and unusual CPU. However, to get to the point after that lengthy context: there is a patch available on the Linux kernel mailing list that adds emulation of NOPL instructions at the kernel level. I would be curious to know whether anyone has tried that - I intend to, after finding some hardware that includes a Geode LX. The patch is found at: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20210626130313.1283485-1-mar...@orca.pet/ (note: it's unclear to me whether the NOPL emulation only works for the Linux kernel itself, or whether it extends to enabling programs that run on the system (aka userspace binaries) that contain NOPL instructions to run. _if_ kernel-level NOPL emulation allows both the kernel _and_ those programs to run correctly, then I think it could be a neat way to provide the security properties of Intel CET on most i686 hardware, while still also allowing OLPC laptops to run the same software (albeit with slightly reduced security properties)) Thanks (and I'll try to remember to update this thread with any findings), James
