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.
I do think there are a lot of x86 systems that have around 512 MB of RAM that could still be used as small office servers, routers etc. that would really benefit from a stable and well supported distribution like CentOS is. They are not very useful for desktop use but many server tasks haven't changed that much in 10 years but have been virtualized or have higher traffic handling requirements. Surveying CentOS 6 users who run the i686 version on non-SSE2 CPUs would also give some sort of indication how many potential users are going to be left out and would need to change their enterprise grade distribution to something else when EOL hits.
My specific use case isn't really worth CentOS 7. I don't think I would ever *really* run anything useful on a 12 year old laptop, it was just the only x86 system I still have around. The CPU generation itself, however, isn't completely useless for some other tasks.
On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 11:41 PM, Trevor Hemsley <trevor.hemsley@ntlworld.com
wrote:
Is it really worth the effort? The last Pentium III was released in 2002 and you couldn't buy them after 2003 so we're talking about machines that are 12 or more years old. The fastest one you could ever buy is outperformed by a factor of more than 2 times by each core on my dual core 2010 vintage Intel Atom D510.
On 05/06/15 21:22, Toni Spets wrote:
This would be rather unfortunate as that would also leave out all 32-bit only AMD processors (Athlon XP & co) as well according to Wikipedia where it's said Athlon 64 was the first one to add SSE2 and it can already run the 64-bit CentOS anyway.
I'm hoping there is more people that could +1 having support for pre-SSE2 CPUs so it would be seriously considered even though it might need massive rebuild of the multilib packages. EPEL doesn't have multilib yet (right?) so they can still adapt to whatever is going to be done. The packages would run on upstream as well anyway.
Taking into account the actual computing power of CPUs, I don't think it's unreasonable to run CentOS 7 on Pentium III or Athlon XP.
Thanks for considering.
On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 9:44 PM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
On 06/05/2015 05:46 AM, Vladimir Stackov wrote:
Greetings,
currently we are maintaining own CentOS 7 i686 rebuild and I would like to kindly ask you to replace following macros from gcc.spec:
%if 0%{?rhel} >= 7 %ifarch %{ix86} --with-arch=x86-64 \ %endif %ifarch x86_64 --with-arch_32=x86-64 \ %endif
with that:
%if 0%{?rhel} >= 7 %ifarch %{ix86} --with-arch=i686 \ %endif %ifarch x86_64 --with-arch_32=i686 \ %endif
x86-64 causes gcc to use extended instruction set for produced code and it's impossible to run CentOS 7 i686 on older systems without SSE2 instruction because of SIGILL. This affects Pentium 3, old VIA CPUs, old Xeons and some others.
Is that possible? Thanks!
<snip>
I don't think we can do this as I also use the RPMs produced for the multilib portion of CentOS-7 x86_64 and we want our RPMs to be like those from upstream for that purpose.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
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