[CentOS-devel] CentOS-5 on i586

Johnny Hughes johnny at centos.org
Sat Apr 5 12:36:21 UTC 2008


Daniel de Kok wrote:
> 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!)

I fully agree with this ... CentOS-5 has very large memory requirements 
to do anything useful (at least 256mb .. probably need more to do 
anything GUI).

I do understand that there are some devices out there that do not 
support i686 ... but there are also risc chips and ARM and Cell and 
(well, you get the picture).

Even most of the VIA chips (newer models) run with i686.

So, unless there is a large demand that I don't see (and more on the 
horizon, not less) then I don't see a need for developing this.

I could be wrong, so if someone knows something I don't then please 
speak up :D

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes

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