On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 1:43 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@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