[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

[Tux99]

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.