[CentOS-devel] C5 i586 support.

Fri Apr 4 11:26:21 UTC 2008
Manuel Tuthill <Manuel at Nebula-IT.co.uk>

Hello,

I've been trying to get in contact with some of the development team
regarding i586 support in C5, I was kindly pointed in this direction.

Reading the archive I can see that it's not a planned feature excerpt below:

"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."

I'd just like to throw my 2pence/2Cents in and explain why I think it should
be supported, and then offer some help in developing it.

While most people seem to think that i586 is totally obsolete, I still use a
few modern systems that use i586 instruction sets and may even consider a
few more. For example I run a Via Epia ME6000 (600Mhz) as a silent HTPC with
1G ram.

With the over abundance of processing power in a modern computer and the
proliferation of embedded type system running at home by hobbyists' and
enthusiasts for asterisk and other single application. Given that Chips like
the i586 Geode and Via Epia are popular it seems a little backward to me to
stop supporting it.

Of course there are other distributions that will cover these. But I'm a
Centos Fan and would prefer to continue running it on all my machines rather
than only some.

So to this end I'd like to try and get some movement behind this. Knowing
that first it looks like I'm going to have to get the powers that be to
agree that it could be included if enough work could be done.


Manuel