[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Sat Sep 25 21:25:48 CEST 2010

2010/9/25 Tux99 <tux99-mga at uridium.org>
+
+> On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Giuseppe Ghibò wrote:
+>
+> > IMHO the problem is not finding an architecture to fit the i586 or i686
+> rpm
+> > flags, rather to find the minimum CPU and memory requirement worthwhile
+> for
+> > a decent usage. With KDE if we look at the Mandriva 2010.1, it's barely
+> > usable on a P4-3000 with 1-2GB RAM, or a AMD Barton 2500. Barely means
+> that
+> > windows and applications are pretty slow to open, switching is slow,
+> etc.;
+> > since netbook are so popular we can consider the minimum requirements as
+> > those of a typical 2010 netbook, which has ATOM 1.6Ghz processor and 1GB
+> > memory. In other words we can consider as default the presence of the SSE
+> > instruction set. ATOM has even the SSE2, which would be even better, but
+> > that would left out some AMD CPU (some older AMD, like 1.2Ghz has only
+> the
+> > 3DNow and not SSE). I would drop compiling for old ISA drivers in kernel
+> > (think to some old ISA 3com card, like 3C505, etc.).
+> >
+>
+> You are not seeing the bigger picture. Mageia is not just for desktop or
+> netbook users or modern powerful servers, there are people using
+> embedded systems that often still have i586 compatible cpus, ISA cards
+> are still very common in industrial uses, etc.
+>
+> Personally I have a VIA C3 based system that I use as home server, and
+> the C3 is only i586 compatible, not i686.
+>
+
+Frankly IMHO such hardware is pretty unusable on a modern distro. I think
+maintaining the compatibility for older legacy hardware is a duty for
+OpenBSD. I tried such (i.e. Mandriva) on older hardware, and it's really
+really slow, even without the graphical stuff. This is for instance a Dual
+PII-450 with SCSI 10000RPM disks and 1GB RAM. At the time such hardware was
+new it was the fastest machine you could assemble, and the distro you could
+run was a lightning. Like if today you would assemble a Dual six-core i7
+985X with 64GB of memory and 6TB RAID disks. And PII don't have the SSE2.
+Every time you upgrade the distro, performance drop to half (it's not a
+matter of optimization, it's because the X11 become bigger, the kernel
+fatter because more and more stuff added, more and more checks, the
+applications bigger, the toolkits slower, the number of libraries higher,
+...).
+
+And furthermore the more older system you have the fewer memory you have
+available. And you can't add more memory because the chipset doesn't support
+more. In these days also counts the consume of energy, so the tendency is
+also to replace old hardware which consumes too much power compared to newer
+hardware and virtualize the old application|system. Unless of course you
+wanna experiment some solar panels... ;-)
+
+Often even doing the installation from scratch won't work anymore, because
+the higher memory requirements. So I really want to know a REAL survey of
+still old (oldest) hardware running and USING the latest distro (latest
+means LATEST, not 1 or 2 years ago distro). I myself have seen even in
+production (of course not on the internet so you don't need patches) systems
+with MDK 7.2 with 128MB RAM and K6, but they wouldn't dare to upgrade it to
+the latest.
+
+That's why I said to drop things that nowadays NOBODY uses anymore. Then if
+someone has such hardware, it wouldn't be a problem of adding a kernel
+module to the kernel list for a certain card that still is used. Of course
+you can argue, that certainly a newer system would have the 64bit
+instruction set support (which has even the SSE2 as lowest common
+denominator), so a user there would certainly install the 64bit system and
+not the 32 one. Then I say this is right.
+
+Regarding VIA C3, I wonder exactly which model you have, how much memory,
+and which distro you are running on it. As at least 4-5 years old C3 core
+Nehemiah models have support for SSE, SSE2, and even crypto hardware
+optimization (that even Intel or AMD doesn't have).
+I'm not saying such hardware is not common, but I wonder whether they would
+install Mageia on it. It even exists slower hardware based on ARM
+architecture, but there isn't any ARM port of the distro. Or is planned one?
+
+
+>
+> Also dropping kernel modules for old hardware does not bring any
+> advantage (they are modules anyway so they don't get loaded on systems
+> where they aren't needed), only disadvantages to those people who need
+> them.
+>
+
+Only advantage is that you get kernel package thinner and building time
+shorter :-)
+
+
+>
+> So please let's try to be as comprehensive as possible, not exclude
+> potential users by creating needless limits and restrictions.
+>
+>
+It's not a matter of excluding potential users, rather providing the real
+requirements, not "it SHOULD work because we compiled with -march=i586...).
+
+Bye
+Giuseppe.
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