[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

[Giuseppe Ghibò]

2010/9/26 Tux99 <tux99-mga at uridium.org>

> memory only (use 1GB swap?)? Were you able to install the 2010.1?
>
> Centos 4 installs and runs perfectly fine on a Pentium II 350Mhz with
> 128MB RAM, I know it because I installed such a box for a friend as home
> server running 24/7 (with DNS server, apache and some other stuff).
> I didn't try Mandriva since it lacks long term support.
>
>
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. 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.


> > Common where? There are schools and universities are dismitting hardware
> > like with P4/2.4Ghz and 512MB RAM for whatever use (either server or
> > desktop). And even older hardware no-ROHS, which should be dismantled
> > carefully.
>
> You are seeing everything from a limited european POV, the P4 you say is
> being thrown away here is a top-end system in some other countries.
> Mageia is supposed to be for the whole world, not just EU/US/BRICs.
>

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.


> With regards to ISA cards, you can even still buy brand new modern mobos
> with ISA slots right here in Europe, they are still common for
> industrial uses:
>
> http://www.spectra.de/produkte/114184/web/spectra/Datenblatt-PMB-601LF.pdf?CFID=92074854-8638-47f6-a589-6517cde18fb1&CFTOKEN=0
>

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.


> > I'm not speaking about exclusion but about including or optimizing for
> arch
> > and hardware that NOBODY will use anymore, because can't.
>
> The optimization you are talking about (which will increase
> performance by a few percentage points at most, not noticeable at all
> in practice) means that the distro will be unusable for others.
>
>
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)...Indeed the
original idea was of having real .i586, .k6, .k7.rpm, .viac3, .viac7.rpm RPM
packages, at least for the core ones: some time ago, when I was fighting
with having a non-crashing kernel for the dedibox, I had started adding such
"dialects" to the RPM macros (but problems were on the glibc package), but
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.

Bye
Giuseppe.
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