[CentOS-devel] C5 i586 support.

Daniel de Kok me at danieldk.org
Sat Apr 5 11:16:49 UTC 2008


On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Manuel Tuthill <Manuel at nebula-it.co.uk> wrote:
>  While most people seem to think that i586 is totally obsolete, I still use a
>  few modern systems that use i586 instruction sets and may even consider a
>  few more. For example I run a Via Epia ME6000 (600Mhz) as a silent HTPC with
>  1G ram.

For correctness' sake: the Epia is a i686, it just doesn't implement
conditional moves. According to the Intel IA32 documentation software
should check availability of this instruction before using it. The
problem is that gcc emits cmov instructions for >= i686 archs.

To be honest, I am not sure if i585 support is worth the extra
maintenance. It's supported by CentOS-4, which is supported until
2012. (Normally, I'd say it's worth the work, but CentOS has different
goals than most other distributions, namely being compatible with the
upstream distribution.)

-- Daniel



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