> On Sun, 20 Oct 2002, Andrew Smith wrote: > >>Well - having thought about it a bit more ... >> >>Removing one 12Mb RPM is quite rediculous when almost EVERY other intel >>RPM is built for an i386. Even glibc has an i386 version. >>If you say that you no longer support i386 - then build all the >>RPM's to i586 and be done with it. If every RPM was at least i586 then >>all intel machines would run a ilttle bit faster. > > Actually, you're wrong. The architecture field present in the > RPM filename, and header indicates the "instruction set" in use > by the binaries inside the package. It means that you need a > machine capable of that instruction set, or higher in order to > install and use the package. <snip> OK - I've cut it all out so as not to waste bandwidth repeating that very useful response - but I'll certainly say that has to be the best reply to an e-mail that I have ever received! Interesting if you take that to the next step - it means that there are NO extra useful instruction or optimisations in a 486 or a Pentium (586) procesor over a 386 processor i.e. Intel's only enhancements from 386 to Pentium (586) was increased processor speed and internal performance. Not only that - but there are also no instruction optimisations in the 486 and Pentium (586) processors over the 386 (OR the compiler developers couldn't be bothered implementing them coz the optimisations are not worth the trouble) >>I can think of a lot of reasons why the i386 kernel was not >>there - but maybe one would be that general RedHat support for > > Ultimately it was a disk space decision, as stated previously in > the thread. The presence of an i386 kernel however would not be > endorsement of "support" for i386/i486 processors. Our box, and > documentation list the minimum system requirements for support. > Any machines or hardware that do not meet the requirements, while > unsupported, may or may not work, and may or may not have a > kernel to use out of the box. Yes - well as stated previously - disk space is not an issue - it was probably more likely someone was told to not put it on (or whoever arranged the CD's contents needs to be fired and replaced) >>older hardware is not as good as MS (RedHat seems to sometimes >>drop support for old hardware that was supported in the previous > > Try to install Windows XP on an i386 or i486 computer and see how far > you get with Microsoft support. My issue is that if there was a 386 kernel on the CD's it WILL work on a 386 so basically you are stopping people who buy/download your ISO's from running software on a machine that WILL work. Yes there is no point running KDE/Gnome on anything much below a PIII 500 (I know that as a fact in earlier releases - a PII 333 is too slow) but you do NOT need X to run a server - my DNS/mail server is only a P90 and my router with over 450 lines of firewall that runs quite a few other things (including a java message server I wrote) is only a P166 and ... well it has PLENTY of spare processor space: up 34 days, load average: 0.19, 0.14, 0.10 Yet they may fall into the "no kernel available" hole in the future even though they are well able to run as a server. I have a 486 that used to be my mail/DNS server but has sat there unused for about a year - but I know it is fast enough to do that job (and it would get that job back if the current P90 failed) > Anyway, I hope this clears up some confusion. > > Take care, > TTYL > > Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris Cleared up a lot of confusion - thanks for the extreemly detailed reply. -- -Cheers -Andrew MS ... if only he hadn't been hang gliding! -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
