[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Sun Sep 26 02:01:42 CEST 2010

On Sun, 26 Sep 2010, Giuseppe Ghibò wrote:
+
+> Centos4 IS NOT a modern distro. It is a LTS started in 2005 and so it
+> maintains 2005's original skeleton of kernel, gcc, glibc and X. That's FIVE
+> years old.
+
+I'm quite sure Centos5/RHEL5 would install and run fine on it too,
+Debian would almost certainly too, the point is when you don't
+install/use a GUI, Linux still can run fine on very old low end
+hardware.
+
+
+> As example MDV 2007.1, which is 3 years old, was still very
+> usable and responsive on my P4/ATI (maybe not as much as stable with 3D
+> acceleration), but 2010.0 ISN'T.
+
+Again, you are missing the point, you are talking about desktop/GUI use!
+Computers get used for a lot of other purposes, not just desktop/GUI use!
+
+
+> That's why I in some way asked a survey of oldest hardware based
+> on own experiences.
+
+Well, my oldest hardware that I still have working is a dual cpu 
+Pentium 233MMX (the original i586) with 384MB RAM (currently has 2008.1 
+on it) and a VIA C3 (samuel2 core, i586 since it lacks CMOV) box with 
+512MB RAM which has mdv 2010.1 installed on it and works fine for it's 
+purpose too (headless home server running 24/7 and only uses 10Watts).
+
+
+> Very interesting, but will such "industrial use" will be target for Mageia
+> (BTW, certainly socket 775 CPU will support SSE and SSE2...)? If they have
+> an ISA slot, I guess is for maintaning the compatibility with some old fancy
+> (and maybe custom) card, certainly not for an ISA ethernet card that can be
+> easily replaced with a cheap PCI one or the one on board.
+
+That was just one example, there are many other situations were you 
+still find ISA hardware, especially in developing countries.
+
+
+> Not exactly. I'm not talking in just using -march=<something> but in also
+> pushing -mfpmath=sse -msse (and maybe -msse2) , which should be much more
+> than JUST 1-2% (1-2% is usually the benchmark tolerance)...
+
+AFAIK SSE will only help with media apps (mplayer, etc) and they do 
+autodedect already anyway so in practice nothing is gained.
+
+
+> being realistic I think it's a lot of work and there aren't the resources,
+> so a choice of the default flags should be done.
+
+Agreed that would be too much work for very little benefit, the default 
+flags of Mandriva are just fine since they still work on i586.
+
+We could have some selected packages also as i686 (like MIB does and 
+like the kernel already is), like for example all the media players, but 
+making the whole distro i686 would break too many uses of it.
+
+