I will freely admit that kernel work has dropped in my priority list. But that didn't excuse sloppy work like my ae1b22f6e46 commit which sought to sidestep an issue for lguest without me having to do much work.

There's a 64 bit atomic exchange instruction on x86 called cmpxchg8b.  This isn't supported on pre-586 processors, so we have cmpxchg8b_emu, but that implementation isn't paravirtualized so won't run under lguest.  That's OK, we used to never run it except on machines which didn't support that cmpxchg8b instruction and I've never received a report.  Then at some point we started doing so: the easiest mod I could see was to switch emulation off except for kernels specifically compiled for 386 or 486.  But I missed Linus' commit which had set the archs on which emulation was skipped:

Note, this patch only adds CMPXCHG8B for the obvious Intel CPU's, not for others. (There was something really messy about cmpxchg8b and clone CPU's, so if you enable it on other CPUs later, do it carefully.)

Now, I could blame Linus for putting that in a commit message, not in the Kconfig.cpu file where anyone changing it was going to see it.  But you should always double-check when you think you're "fixing" something, and I didn't.

(I get annoyed when developers don't detail exactly what commit introduced a problem: it's not just for convenient reading, but such research often prevents reintroducing subtle bugs! Like, say, Cyrix 6x86 not booting...)