Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo i486 support

[R0b0t1 <r030t1@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 8:08 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 1.  Museum hardware.  People have systems that are running simply
> BECAUSE they are old, not because they are cost-effective/etc.  I'm
> not sure I'd even lump used hardware into this category any longer, as
> I'm sure there are plenty of i686+ used PCs at rock-bottom prices
> already out there, and maintaining pre-Y2K hardware is going to be
> fairly painful.  For this use case i386 as the baseline makes a LOT of
> sense.
>
> 2.  Non-museum hardware.  People have x86 hardware because it is the
> most cost-effective solution for a task, and not merely because it is
> old.  IMO for this use case i686 makes a lot more sense as a baseline.
> However, I'm honestly not sure in this day and age what these use
> cases even are, unless it is something you can buy for $10 at a flea
> market.  Even if you're talking about a container running one
> application that only needs 500kB of RAM, is there really that much
> benefit to not building it for amd64?
>

I don't want to get very offtopic, but:

Even newer embedded i586 and i686 hardware isn't cost effective
considering power consumption. When considering power it often does
not even make sense to run donated hardware ~5 years old.

I don't think this should be used to completely drop support for older
platforms but it is probably the best argument to use to convince
people to get rid of their old hardware.


> The other argument for i386 would be that in Gentoo nobody is stuck
> with the defaults.  So, a default that works more widely as an entry
> point makes a lot of sense, since anybody can set CFLAGs and do an
> emerge -e world to get the benefits.  Then again, if we're talking
> about older but not ancient hardware that is still quite a bit of
> build time.
>

This is definitely in the spirit of Gentoo, but I think the most
concrete reason to support older platforms is they are demonstrably
more secure and people may be using them for that reason.

Cheers,
    R0b0t1