Brian Schueler wrote:

Hi, folks.

Building a CentOS-5 Kernel for 586 machines is a quite simple way by enabling i586 in the spec file, adding the kabi information and creating a debug configuration for i586. Glibc and openssl for i586 rebuilds out of the box. Is there a convenient way for CentOS to maintaining i586 for version 5.1+ as it was done on CentOS-4? I have seen already an i586 Kernel for CentOS 5.0 in the plus repository - but I would like to know what problems occurred causing a discontinuing. I've made a patch for the kernel srpm (working on 2.6.18-53.el5 up to 2.6.18-53.1.6.el5) enabling rebuilding for the i586 target. CentOS 5.1 successfully runs on a Pentium 1 (tested: 200 MHz, 64MB RAM). (AMD-K6 should run, too.)

I do understand that it will run (barely) on those in CLI mode, but that is far below the RHEL guidelines for memory and support.

The motivation is that some i586 class routers running CentOS-3 which should be replaced with 5.

CentOS-4 might be a better choice as we intend to support i586 on there for it's lifetime.

The patch is located at: http://dbl76.tfh-berlin.de/~s18009/c5/special/kernel-2.6.18-xxx.march_i586.e...

The c5 centosplus kernel can already build i586 ...

The problem is that we do not want to support i586 on c5 and forward because the anaconda changes required to make install possible are much harder than on CentOS-4.

With the development of the c5 liveCD and that also depending on anaconda, we do not think that i586 support is really worth the risk of incompatibility that major changes to anaconda can cause.

Also ... the C5 openssl and glibc do NOW build on i586, however they are not guaranteed to do so in the future. We have already had the centos-4 glibc NOT building on i586 and that causing problems in the past.

We will support i586 on CentOS-4 until 2012, but I don't see us supporting it at this time on CentOS-5. That could change.