peter green wrote: > calling stuff i386 when it will not run natively on a 386 seems like asking > for confustion to me
True, but we're way to close to a release to fix *that*. And I'm not sure that we could easily fix binary-i386 at all.. > why and when was this instruction emulation needed in the first place (that > is why and when was the userland changed to need it) Looking in that archive, this was first discussed in April 2003: <http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/17/> Debian to drop Support for i386? Jochen Friedrich [30]noted that due to GCC 3.2 the new libstdc++5 library requires an 80486 processor or higher, the old 80386 on which Linux was started, is no longer supported. Therefore Matthias Klose [31]wondered whether Debian should further support the i386 target. 30. http://bugs.debian.org/185662 31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0304/msg01895.html <http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/18/> Dropping Support for i386? Nathanael Nerode [17]investigated the i386 problem and discovered that to maintain binary compatibility with C++ packages from other distributions, Debian needs to use the i486 version of atomicity.h supplied by GCC. Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker [18]wrote a small [19]script that compares the speed of OpenSSL code for i386 versus i486 on a P-III Mobile. 17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0304/msg02112.html 18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0304/msg02134.html 19. http://ilmari.org/sslcmp Another URL that was inspired by and mentioned on the debian-release mailing list: <http://people.debian.org/~joey/pr/3.1/i386.html> Hope that helps. Regards, Joey -- Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it! -- Mark Twain Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
