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.
I think this is not true, that code optimised for the 586 may run slowe
on Pentium {II,II,IV} and AMD CPUs.
Correct optimisation relies on knowledge of how the target processor
executes its instructions, and on how the CPU is designed, so that
each of the CPU's major components can be kept busy.
> The argument has been stated before that the majority of performance
> gain is in using the kernel and glibc that matches your processor -
> and that all the rest is more effort than worth the gain.
> However, if they all were already i586 then the effort would be zero
> to anyone installing to have all to be at least i586
>
> Secondly, there is no such thing as a height measurement that puts
> the lowest pentium above the highest Cyrix 6x86.
I think the 6x86 is an imperfect clone of the Pentium. I don't know what
its imperfections are, but I noticed that motherboard manufacturers
are a bit picky about which ones thay say "works with this board."
> 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 older hardware
> is not as good as MS (RedHat seems to sometimes drop support for old
> hardware that was supported in the previous release)
The principal point of the i386 kernel is that it will run on anything. Apparently
that's not so wrt the i586 kernel, even where "compatible" CPUs are used.
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