[CentOS-devel] CentOS-5 on i586

[Daniel de Kok]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 1:43 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
>  Thanks Manuel for stepping up and offering to help with the i586 work. I
>  know that we had already done some work on this a long time back, Daniel
>  doing most of the heavy lifting at the time.
>
>  Afaik, Daniel has been busy with RealLife [tm] issues, so I am not sure
>  if he wants to stay as the centos-devel as point man for this project.
>  If not, I will step in and get involved.

I currently don't have the time to lead such effort. But, I am willing
to look into the Anaconda issues, provided that there is enough
interest in a i586 or i686 sans cmov "port".

>  He did, however, ask a very important question - is there enough
>  traction in the i586 world today to even consider the i586 port
>  worthwhile ? Since most major platforms really are i686 ? I'd still like
>  to see some answers to that question!

FWIW: as far as I recall, we only tested the previous changes on i686
without cmov (VIA and an altered version of qemu). i586 may be even a
step further. Two other considerations:

1. Current VIA CPUs do support cmov.
2. Most i586 machines will probably have little memory, and are better
served by CentOS-4.

So, IMHO someone needs to make a good case. Three users are probably
not really interesting, if someone is developing a (embedded) device
that happens to run a i586-class CPU on CentOS, it gets interesting.
So, speak up :). (Of course, this only reflects my views on i586
support!)

-- Daniel