[om-council] i586

Kate Lebedeff kate at lebedeff.co.uk
Mon Apr 25 07:42:18 EDT 2016


Thank you Bero

Saving this text for the case of our soon abandoning of i586 - for blog post:)



> On 25Apr, 2016, at 13:37, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero at lindev.ch> wrote:
> 
> 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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