i586 kernel [was Re: Module symbol versions in installer kernel]

[Dave Jones]

On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 19:28, Matthew Miller wrote:

> I'm very sympathetic to making Linux run on older hardware, but Fedora is
> already pretty unfriendly to those systems as is. Why not just make the
> Pentium Pro the minimum for FC3? That covers us all the way to back to 1995
> (well, okay, 1998, since the PPro never really caught on and there were all
> those MMX P5s).

Not strictly true. You can pick up quad ppro systems on ebay for quite
reasonable amounts of money, which is a nice way for a developer to get
a cheap 4-way SMP system.  It's not going to give anything modern a run
for its money, but its still a very usable system.  Until a few weeks
ago, I had two of them myself, both with a gig of RAM and 20gb of hw
raid5'd SCSI. (Space/Noise considerations meant getting rid of one of
them).  They make very nice test boxes, that during the early 2.5.x
kernels brought out all sorts of bugs that didn't show up on my faster
SMP boxes until much later.

>  Other distros -- perhaps even a tailored Fedora branch --
> can cover before that.

When we have a proper infrastructure in place, I'd like to see something
like that happen for anything < 686, but right now we're quite a way
from that goal.  Ultimately at some point I wouldn't be surprised to see
this happen given that RHEL has a minimum requirement of 686.

	Dave