Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of undocumented x86 instructions


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Can be undeleted via WP:REFUND for the purpose of transwiki if desired.  Sandstein  08:19, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

List of undocumented x86 instructions

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Fails WP:LISTN, sourced mainly to blogs, fora, primary sources... Basically, a lot of WP:OR / WP:SYNTH extracted from many unreliable sites. Fram (talk) 10:15, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. Fram (talk) 10:15, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Wikipedia is not a manual or a directory. Mccapra (talk) 10:17, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per WP:TNT, but not without prejudice to recreation as a valid spin off, unless consensus is against having a list of x86 instructions in general (in which case transwikify to Wikibooks). You are welcome to nominate that article for deletion. This article was split off from the main article because it was unwieldy. The article needs to be much better sourced, but there are plenty of RS which discuss undocumented x86 instructions as a group. discusses a systematic way to find them, similar to an well known 2017 paper and presentation at BlackHat ( is the paper itself).  discusses it too, although I’m on mobile so I can’t assess reliability. Intel and AMD’s own software development manuals contain lists of previously undocumented instructions kept for backwards compatibility, but those don’t count toward notability—just the availability of reliable sources.  gives a detailed example of the significance of undocumented instructions to x86 security and the topic has at least been picked up by Forbes . The list should merely be pared down to well sourced items; indeed it’s just as possible to have assembly cruft as cricket cruft, and Wikipedia has both. I’ll look for more sources when I have time; I suspect there are at least a few print sources which describe this list in more detail, but they will necessarily be fairly obscure. TL;DR: A valid split from main article, and sourceable without much OR and SYNTH concerns—that’s just not how the article is right now. Ovinus (talk) 14:12, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
 * From that first source: "Also, after classifying the large quantity of the detection results, the amount can be reduced to less than 10000 instructions which is a reasonable amount for further research." 10,000! The topic of undocumented instructions may be suitable for an article with sources like this (and with perhaps a wselect few well-documented "undocumented" ones), but a list like this seems useless.
 * Loling at "well-documented undocumented". Yup, ultimately this article (and the List of discontinued x86 instructions one you PRODed) are spinoffs of the bloated, poorly presented and poorly sourced main article. About the 10,000 number, my understanding is that most of the undocumented instructions are fairly benign, or involve some sort of "alternative prefix", i.e., a particular undocumented set of instructions has a one-to-one correspondence with a particular set of documented instructions. Anyway, you can see the discussion about splitting between me and User:Punpcklbw here. All the documented stuff is immediately sourceable to Intel and AMD's own manuals, but I confess I never considered whether this work is flying totally against WP:NOTDATABASE and WP:NOT in general. The x86 assembly Wikibook] could use it—it deserves completeness. Thoughts on migrating the content there? Ovinus (talk) 14:51, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
 * When looking at it - this situation basically started out with the main x86 instruction listings article being too long and unwieldy, but where my initial attempt at splitting out some of its content to separate articles ended up with two articles (the one under discussion here and the List of discontinued x86 instructions) that do not really work well as standalone articles and as such, both have been suggested for deletion (under WP:LISTN, WP:NOTMANUAL, WP:NOTDATABASE etc).
 * This seems to indicate that this might not be content suitable for Wikipedia per se, and as such it would be indeed be better to move all of these listings to something like the x86 assembly wikibook suggested by User:Ovinus.
 * While I'm basically fine with such an outcome, I'd suggest a different possibility: rename these articles to establish that they're really parts of one big list rather than truly standalone lists - i.e. WP:NCLONGLIST - in which case the proper action to take for this article would be to rename it to something like "x86 instruction listings (undocumented)" - and similarly for the discontinued-list (and any other splits done of the main x86 instruction listings article) - and then add a compact-TOC to each of these articles to help navigate between the various parts of the list, as is often done with overlong lists elsewhere on WP.
 * (This obviously doesn't address any WP:RS, WP:LSC, WP:SYNTH issues that the current undocumented-instruction listing has, though.) Punpcklbw (talk) 01:47, 30 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Transwiki to Wikibooks x86 assembly Wikibook] could use this as well as List of discontinued x86 instructions.  Dr vulpes  (💬 • 📝) 07:54, 30 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Transwiki makes the most sense to me. This is a more clear-cut case for deletion (from Wikipedia) than Articles for deletion/X86 instruction listings. Caleb Stanford (talk) 22:19, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Transwiki per the above, as this is substantially unlike the other x86 articles. How can we find documentation of undocumented instructions? jp×g 22:32, 4 July 2022 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.