On 06/06/2015 10:34 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

On Jun 6, 2015 10:06, "Lamar Owen" <lowen@pari.edu> wrote:
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> On 06/06/2015 03:38 AM, Toni Spets wrote:
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>> If you think it this way, why bother with the i686 build at all? Your dual core 2010 vintage Intel Atom D510 can run 64-bit CentOS 7 anyway. This is why dropping SSE2 requirement would be benefitical as it would allow running it with a larger amount of x86 CPUs that can't run the 64-bit variation at all.
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> Older Xeon systems that are non-64bit capable are one set of possible targets. If PAE is disabled, Pentium M is likewise a good target (we're running Windows 7 Pro here on some Dell Latitude D610's with reasonable performance; CentOS would run on these quite well, as they are single-core 2GHz Pentium M with 2GB of RAM and somewhat reasonable ATI X300 video, if PAE isn't required). Of course, NetBurst Xeon is a performance pig, but a non-profit that has an older but high-quality server with NetBurst Xeon in it might not have the discretionary funds to obtain a similar quality system with a more modern and power-efficient CPU; they'll run it until it breaks and it's no longer discretionary to replace it.
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> Pentium M on the other hand performs very well at 2GHz. We have a number of D600's, but they are just not quite up to the task of running Win7 reasonably well. That era, 2004 or so, seems to be the break-point for boxes that are still very usable running modern workloads. D600's still make excellent service laptops for things requiring serial ports (like our datum SSU-2000 timeserver with a PRS45A cesium primary refclock). I have a couple of D600's parked at a co-lo just for that sort of troubleshooting purpose where RS-232 is still needed, and another D600 running the software for our Advin Pilot EPROM programmer, which needs a parallel port connection (I did mention specialty hardware before.....).
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The part not addressed in this is getting the 2 main windowing systems to work well in such 'constrained' environments as neither KDE or gnome think such hardware worth dealing with issues on (if it works great if it doesn't tough from previous experience trying to get help). So you are ending up having to customize more and .more to the point it isn't really centos anymore.

Lighter desktop environments with far fewer resource requirements exist and are heavily used. And if xfce/lxde or others exist for the ARM platform, I am 100% sure those are ( or will be ) available for i686 as well. I even have friends with PCs assembled from components manufactured in 2014 with SSD and 2 digits worth of RAM ( expressed in GB ) who use xfce ! That the DE will not come from base CentOS ... OK. It won't. So what? A lot of the people who use LAMP stacks based on CentOS replace the core php ( and lately even mysql ) and we do not ban them :) Do we offer support for something we do not ship ? No, we don't. But that's not a reason to not allow it to be done by others. Let us be the foundation !

However, if you want to say that all the i686 stack will need to be [re]generated using the recompiled compiler... yes, I am with you on this one. It will probably be the case and to be honest I am not sure it's worth it. But that would be the exact use case for a "i386" parallel set of packages, as once existed in parallel with i686 ( and athlon!).

For WITW ( and almost unrelated to the matter at hand ), my general manager who is a US citizen but also a freak defined by "I want a very very very light laptop" ( 12 years ago the guy used to travel WITHOUT the battery on his Compaq laptop... ) tasked me 4 days ago to look for a 11.6" (!!) laptop similar to his Sharp MM10 which just died. And NOT a chromebook but something able to run Outlook!

Bottom line, let's not dismiss old hardware just because it's more convenient. If there is a use case and there are people willing to enroll at the task of maintaining it , I'd say "go for it". But once again, as a parallel set of packages, not by replacing what already was built and is shipped for the i686 arch.

wolfy, proud owner of a VIA C3 based fully functional computer