On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Manuel Tuthill Manuel@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