Thomas Backlund a écrit :
Giuseppe Ghibò skrev 26.9.2010 14:59:
2010/9/26 Thomas Backlund <tmb@iki.fi <mailto:tmb@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
____
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.