[om-council] i586

Bernhard Rosenkraenzer bero at lindev.ch
Mon Apr 25 07:37:30 EDT 2016


On 2016-04-25 12:15, Kate Lebedeff wrote:

> Mmmm, i586 is normally needed by the users with lowest income:(

These days it's extremely hard to find i586 class hardware, you'd have 
to go out of your way to even find someone giving it away for free 
anymore.

I think most people trying to use i586 these days either simply have no 
idea that their CPU is actually 64-bit capable ("why would it be a 
64-bit CPU if it came with 32-bit Windows?"), or they have some reason 
to be scared of 64-bit even though it would run perfectly on their 
hardware, or they're (hardly always low income) enthusiasts who need to 
find some purpose for their beloved 20 year-old hardware even though 
they have 15 newer devices floating around.
Typically boxes like that end up being fileservers or something on a 
network - something you can do with OMLx, but hardly what we do best.

One use case I've heard for maintaining an x86_32 (let's not say i586 -- 
at the very least we should switch to i686 there) port is some tablets 
with a broken BIOS.
Looks like e.g. the Trekstor SurfTab wintron has a 64-bit CPU, but a 
BIOS that was written in 32-bit mode and will only launch a 32-bit UEFI 
binary.
This should be fixable though, there's no reason why we can't drop a 
32-bit UEFI binary into an x86_64 image and just make that boot a 64-bit 
kernel.

> Tomek, how many people "full time" so to say we'd need to maintain 
> i586?

1 would do, if that person was really truly dedicated to the task and 
capable of keeping up with what we do for the other arches...

ttyl
bero



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