On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 03:28:02PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Stephen Stafford wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 02:25:52PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > > > What about perusing the INT 6 idea, and going all the way up to i686? > > While I support the removal of 386 support, I absolutely and strenuously > > object to going to 686. 686 isn't all that old at all (1997 IIRC), and I > > use a nunber of 4/586 machines still (I have one 486 which I use for > > embedded development and 3 P100 boxen which are used for various things like > > CVS server, gateway/firewall, testing various things). > Note that my idea was about patching the kernel that so the newer opcodes > would be emulated in software. Everything would still work even on a 386, > just slower -- and the speed decrease can be removed by running apt-build.
I'm still not convinced. Your argument works just as well in reverse. If people running >=686 want to they are perfectly capable of building the packages to take advantage of it themselves, and FAR more able to afford the computrons to do so (recompiling most of a system on a 486 will never be my idea of fun...on (say) a 1GHz machine, it's far easier to do) I'm also still not convinced of the usefulness of these optinisations per architecture at non-high loads. I submit that a 486 is FAR more likely to be running at high load than a 1GHz machine. The 486 can far less afford the performance hit from emulating instructions in software than a 1GHz machine can by not having the small optimisations built by default. This basically comes down to "will a significant portion of our userbase suffer if we do this?" Personally I think the answer is "yes". You obviously have a different viewpoint here :) Cheers, Stephen
