[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Sat Sep 25 22:09:27 CEST 2010

>
+> Since the vast majority of new processors are 64-bit capable, I see no
+> point in *only* supporting the newest of the old CPUs.  All the 32-bit
+> stuff will eventually die on its own anyways.
+>
+> I *definitely* do not want to see dropping support for everything that
+> doesn't do SSE2 (which was discussed in the Fedora thread you linked).
+>
+
+PII is not SSE2 capable. I cited SSE2, because it was  giving even more
+boosts. SSE3, 4, etc. needs special support to gain further boosts.
+
+
+>
+> IMHO, just sticking with i586 support is the path-of-least-resistance
+> and doesn't alienate people who must use older hardware out of
+> financial or geographic necessity.
+>
+> I would not use KDE as a basis for ruling out support of older
+> hardware.  Mageia will offer many lightweight alternatives to KDE.
+>
+
+Any system REALLY lightweight is welcome, but it's not a matter of just
+choosing a desktop rather than another. There are also toolkits, and they
+are getting fatter. Maybe a legacy system with just motif (or lesstif)
+applications would be lightweight nowadays. But IMHO this is just an
+illusion and get people "angry". I really want to see such a lightweight
+system even for ATOM CPUs.
+
+I spent days and days in try to understand why passing from a distro to two
+versions later, my shining not-so-new P4 hardware with ATI card become from
+lightning to usable to a slow-dog that it was not able to keep at the same
+time a browser and a mail client without slaughtering the hard disk with
+swap. And the answer was that there wasn't any bottenleck in the distro
+(beyond playing with Composite, XAA and EXA...).
+Simply the upstream applications become fatter because they added more
+checks, etc.; you might experience this even not using graphics at all but
+remaining in console mode only.
+And phoronix benchmarks shown this. Only difference is that when you
+test adjacent
+releases the differences are tighter, so you wouldn't notice too much. For
+instance the whole distro of Xandros running on the first EEEPCs, was able
+to boot and go X in 10-15 seconds. But when starting OpenOffice/Staroffice
+there, or acrobat reader, was not faster than the same time they were taking
+on MDV.
+
+Even newer versions of what was considered the most optimized and
+lightweight distro, VectorLinux, become slower. Or try to put in a CDROM an
+older Knoppix 3.2 of 2005 against Knoppix 6.2 on the same hardware...
+
+Of course we shouldn't forget that the MDV had already a system for
+providing optimized (look at /usr/lib/sse2 for instance) version of
+libraries according to instruction set supported.
+
+So my suggestion was just to rethink to the lowest common denominator for 32
+bit consider that we are in year 2010, maybe adding to such list the SSE and
+MMX sets. And by contrary are the CPU not supporting such set still usable
+with the newer distro even in console mode (fileserver, webserver, dns
+server, etc.)? Have they enough memory to run even the installer? Just a
+survey.
+
+Note that I'm always in favour in preserving the legacy stuff, especially
+for software applications, but when things are done in a certain way, even
+if there is only one SINGLE user using it (he would have invested time in
+learning things, so why removing things he knows and use?).
+
+
+> Because the kernel is modular, excluding older drivers may save some
+> hard disk space, but won't affect the actual kernel size much.  As
+> soon as you exclude support for ISA, someone will come along wondering
+> why their $VeryImportantOlderHW no longer works.  ;o)
+>
+
+when it works...I saw in the past many of my most important old hardware,
+like some PCMCIA network card or modem not working or supported anymore...
+;-)
+
+Bye
+Giuseppe.
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