[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Sun Sep 26 15:55:59 CEST 2010

Thomas Backlund a écrit :
+>
+> Giuseppe Ghibò skrev 26.9.2010 14:59:
+>> 2010/9/26 Thomas Backlund <tmb at iki.fi <mailto:tmb at iki.fi>>
+>>
+>>     Giuseppe Ghibò skrev 26.9.2010 02:09:
+>> >
+>>
+>>         I don't want to deprive the fun of building a router or a
+>>         firewall from
+>>
+>>         an old P133/64 with two ethernet cards, or some mediabox, but
+>>         often you
+>>         can't  (and sometimes you pay of energy power in a year much
+>>         more than
+>>         getting some 30-50E linksys ARM linux based router. And when
+>>         soemone try
+>>         such kind of attempts in the real world with your distro, will
+>>         be very
+>>         disappointed of failures. That's why I in some way asked a 
+>> survey of
+>>         oldest hardware based on own experiences.
+>>
+>>
+>>     You still miss the point that in Mageia community there are many
+>>     users that find 30-50e a _lot_ of money, and we dont want to shut
+>>     them out.
+>>
+>>
+>> I'm not decreasing the value of the money, but rather I was pointing out
+>> the false assumption that mageia (or the current inherited mandriva)
+>> would work and would work FINE (or at all) on that hardware just because
+>> it was using a compatible instruction set.
+>
+> Well, it depends of what you consider "FINE".
+> I dont expect people using old hardware to try to get KDE or any 3d 
+> stuff to work "FINE".
+>
+> But we have lightweight platforms such as lxde and xfce that both 
+> works moderate/fast on a 200MHz+ platform with 128MB+ RAM.
+>
+> Then if you want it as a server, its even easier... you dont even need 
+> a DE/GUI, as it's manageable through console/shell.
+>
+>
+>> I'm not against this, but if
+>> that we wanna support that kind of hardware there is MUCH MORE work to
+>> do (I suggested a LEGACY section in the wiki, but seems it wasn't
+>> caught) than just keeping the actual flags, because in that way if we
+>> don't change then nobody will complain. Even the simple lzma payload of
+>> rpm packages requires much more memory than in the past with gzip. I'm
+>> not sure with current squashfs for the initial ram disks.
+>>
+>> I already cited there are other distro which maybe do a lot better this
+>> job. In many countries there isn't even the broadband, dialup, nor the
+>> electrical power for them. Right now you are almost assuming that a 10
+>> years old instruction set is still a no go, and that our distro is
+>> optimized like the one of the One Laptop Per Child Project.
+>
+> I know we dont optimize for OLPC.
+>
+> Yes, the instruction set is old, but there are many systems that are 
+> older. and even if the hw is newer, it still does not enforce full 
+> i686 spec, as seen for example with either missing CMOV or another 
+> broken register. Even Intel got it wrong with some series of the 
+> Pentium D wich didn't work with i686 series builds...
+>
+>
+>> Sadly it
+>> isn't. But there is also a 2nd point: on old hardware it is still
+>> possible to run old software and old distros: strange but true. Such old
+>> software is still doing its dirty job. It's not that you get a trojan as
+>> soon as you put the nose out the net. There are still ways of
+>> configuring a distro on a LAN and trust in the people using the
+>> terminals locally. Many schools still use them. In a 2 hours lesson at
+>> school you can't wait half an our just to have your desktop booting...,
+>
+> It does not take half an hour if you use xfce/lxde.
+>
+>> the same if you plan an antispam server with latest antispam tools on a
+>> server of that category (server that was doing it's dirty job with the
+>> distro of 2 or 3 generations ago).
+>>
+>
+> Oh, I know several servers out there running on i586 ~200Mhz that has 
+> no problem what so ever keeping up with the spam/av filtering.
+>
+>> I also tried such old hardware, but there are much less bloated distro
+>> and less bloated kernels (even non-linux ones) that do the job (or a
+>> specific duty) on such hardware a lot better than ours.
+>>
+>
+> Maybe so, but does that mean we should force them to _not_ use Mageia ?
+>
+> -- 
+> Thomas
+> ____
+To cease support for i586 seems to me to be the height of arrogance.
+If new i586-level hardware can still be bought somewhere in the world, 
+it is still current hardware.
+And look at how many 5-year-old, and even 10-year-old, cars are still in 
+use.  Since cars have inherently a much shorter life, computers bought 
+new 5 years ago, or even 10 years ago, should be still be considered 
+current hardware.  It doesn't really matter if most users - concentrated 
+in the richer countries - have much more powerful hardware.  As has 
+already been pointed out, there is 64-bit support, and a i686 
+compilation of the kernel to satisfy those with newer hardware that 
+can't (32-bit processor or not enough memory) or prefer not to use the 
+64-bit compilations.
+Note that the kernel is probably where most of the performance gains are 
+to be made with i686, so dropping i586 in favour of i686 would give 
+little in performance gains.
+After all, don't we want almost everyone to be able to use Mageia ?
+- andré
+