On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Gordan Bobic <gordan(a)bobich.net> wrote:
On 10/09/2012 03:48 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> The x86 port still supports a Pentium, I don't see any reason to drop
>> support for kirkwood. Is it really that much extra effort?
>
>
> It is surprisingly quite a lot of effort.
>
> Fedora no longer supports Pentium actually. It was dropped some time
> ago (around Fedora 12 from memory).
F11 was the last version that supports i586. F12 is i686-only.
> The lowest level of support in
> Fedora for x86 is now Pentium Pro (Basically i586 + CMOV) which allows
> support for the OLPC XO-1 (AMD Geode Processor) and the only reason
> it's still at that level is because there's around 1.5 million XO-1
> united deployed and still be actively used and upgraded to current
> Fedora releases (The just released 12.1.0 is based on Fedora 17, the
> under development 13.1.0 release is based on Fedora 18). I know
> mainline Fedora would like to drop the support for that too if they
> could.
Might as well wait until the whole 32-bit branch can be dropped. Practically
all x86 CPU made in most of the past decade is x86-64.
Half decade maybe as Intel first introduced 64 bit CPUs in early 2005
and it took a while to spread through their product set, and there
was a lot of Atom CPUs that weren't 64 bit capable. But I agree the
reasons for 32 is slowly receding.
Peter