On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 20:09, Martin v. Löwis wrote: > Lars Wirzenius wrote: > > So using a 386 as a router and firewall, which it is perfectly capable > > of hardwarewise > > Is that really the case? > > a) Is anybody actually doing this, today? > > b) Do you then have 10MB or 100MB ethernet in that computer? > Can you even put a 100MB ethernet card into the computer? > Does it have PCI?
The first PCI machines were 486 based. The early 486 machines used EISA bus, VL in addition to ISA, or maybe plain ISA. The 486 came out before the PCI bus. When the 486 hit it's peak (486-100 class machines) the PCI bus was just beginning. I have not seen or heard of a 386-PCI system, although they may be used for some special applications (not commodity PCs). A 386 with an ISA bus could not get full bandwidth out of 10baseT. I don't recall seeing anything better than about 600KB/s, although with a recent kernel I'm sure you could get better than that I doubt it would be a full 10megabit. > If there is enough userbase for an i386 distribution, > I wouldn't mind if an i386 port was maintained separately. > However, I really think it would be a good thing if Linux > could, in general, assume 486+ (or perhaps even Pentium+). It does sound like it would be a good idea to have a separate build for 386 and 486, then we could optimise everything else for 586+. We can even use P2 machines for build daemons so we wouldn't have the speed problems we have with M68K... :-# -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
