[CentOS-devel] EPEL and i686

Fri Jan 24 23:32:29 UTC 2014
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 24 January 2014 16:00, Todd Rinaldo <toddr at cpanel.net> wrote:

>
> On Jan 24, 2014, at 4:29 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
>
> > On 01/24/2014 10:26 PM, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
> >> On 01/25/2014 12:13 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> >>> Hi
> >>>
> >>> Whats the plan for EPEL i686 / EL7 ? Does anyone know if there is even
> >>> going to be a multilib attempt or is everything going to stay x86_64
> clean ?
> >> they build for x86_64 and ppc64 only,
> >
> > So then the question is - what is the process to enable i686 there ( or,
> > do we then need to own all of EPEL - atleast some subset ) locally if we
> > are going to attempt a i686 CentOS build ?
> >
> > - KB
>
> Could I ask what the use case is for i386 support? I know that the
> pointers are smaller but memory is cheap. Is this a speed or a hardware or
> a can it be done goal?
>
>
There are several items I see i686 support being needed:

1) Memory is not cheap in cloud and hosted environments. Especially in
cloud where you might be firing up a thousand hosts at a time.
2) Multiple Virtual Machines don't do well in the transition from 32 bit to
64 bit in that their memory usage doesn't go up by *2 but can be ^2
depending on the workload. Python is a perfect example of this but there
are cases in java and other 'virtual machine' environments where it happens.
3) As nice as having i686 compat libraries are for some commercial apps you
end up needing a lot more than what is provided by the OS. This really
comes up when you have to run a mixed set of commercial binaries that need
something that only EL7 provides but also needs stuff that EL6 had. Thus
you end up needing i686 everything.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/attachments/20140124/15fa8c3e/attachment-0005.html>