[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Sun Sep 26 17:04:19 CEST 2010

2010/9/26 andré <andr55 at laposte.net>
+
+> 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.
+>
+
+The height of arrogance? C'mon you are seeing politics (like the apology the
+culture of the waste...or a reverse robin hood which stoles CPU cycles to
+poor CPU to give to rich ones) where there isn't.
+
+
+> If new i586-level hardware can still be bought somewhere in the world, it
+> is still current hardware.
+>
+
+Also i386 and i486 hardware can still bought somewhere (including ebay) and
+maybe one want to run. Why we don't lower to i386 compatatibility set
+instead of i586? IIRC the i586 origin was to give something more optimized
+than what was the average distro like RH. But maybe this could be changed.
+
+
+> 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 -
+
+
+There are many places in the world where old cars can't circulate anymore or
+have restrictions in the zone where they are allowed to circulate (because
+of laws according to the engine classification they are on). Maybe it's a
+lobby of car vendors to sell new cars dunno. BTW, I've an old car. But the
+car analogy is not appropriate because you can still use the car to reach a
+place at a certain average speed and with certain safety levels (e.g. is
+compliant against safety belts) not much different than the one of the
+latest shining EURO5 models  (also due to speed limits). Apart this, cars
+don't have a shorter life than PCs. While indeed I've seen many motherboard
+and hard disks dying after a much shorter period of time (and repairing
+would cost much more than buying a new one). Surviving ones on a such long
+period of time were just very expensive one (at the time they were new)
+which had a very good maintenance. In percentage almost all the MSI
+motherboards died after 5-6 years (maybe after 2 or 3). Gigabyte were
+similar. ASUS had the lowest percentage of failure. Intel motherboard were
+too expensive to buy.
+
+Furthermore many new i586 solution are of much more elitism than newer
+hardware. A newer mini-itx with a VIA CPU doesn't cost less than an entry
+level CPU of AMD (which arrives at SSE4.1 or more SIMD set) and an
+all-in-one motherboard. And even hardware with some particular slot support
+(like ISA) doesn't costs less than one having just a PCI + PCIe slot.
+
+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 ?
+>
+
+Of course, but it's not a panacea that runs everywhere. My initial post was
+that we were still keeping a brake on and keeping compatibility for things
+that NOBODY will use or CAN'T USE for technical reasons. NOBODY means ZERO,
+NICHT, NADA, NOTHING. If there is at least ONE, then it's not ZERO anymore.
+
+So my post was to keep a BETTER support for old and legacy hardware, not
+just CLAIM there is where INDEED there ISN'T or there couldn't be (because
+for instance there isn't enough memory to run the installer) or that NOBODY
+has TESTED for several reasons.
+
+Bye
+Giuseppe.
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