On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 14:53 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

From: Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@hughesjr.com

...

RedHat doesn't support i586 support at all with CentOS-4 ... not via the kernel or glibc. CentOS (starting with version 3.3) built an i586 kernel. CentOS-4 continued this support. One way to support this would be to use the i386 version. Seems like what RH recommended on the upstream bug I submitted.

I'm sure, based on my prior conversation with Cox, that Red Hat really has absolutely _no_ interest in supporting i586 out of sheer marketshare. It's either i486 (i386) or i686 for them.

Unlike i486 and i686, i586 is a _specific_ (and partially buggy**) product -- namely original Pentium and Pentium MMX products and _no_ other. All subsequent Intel products (Pentium Pro on-ward) have been i686. And _all_ clones, cores, etc... have either been i486 or i686 ISA compatible.

[ **NOTE: I'm not talking about the FPU bug. That was minor compared to many of its other bugs and, even worse, some real design flaws in the ALU and control. ]

Right ... but in a software capacity we are also talking about pentium, pentium mmx, cyrix i686, amd k6, via c3 that use i586 packages.

RHEL-4 does not support these chips at all, and has no intention of providing that support.

CentOS is trying to provide limited support for them. This support doesn't in any way affect other packages like glibc.i686 or the i686 kernels ... In case someone might be concerned about a CentOS / RHEL divergence. The i586 packages are only installed on machines that have i586 processors ... if you have i686 then that is what is installed on your machine.

Red Hat did seem open to at least reviewing a patch to the glibc package that provides i586 support if we get it working.