[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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