Chris Adams (cmadams(a)hiwaay.net) said:
Removing support for still-functional hardware is a trademark of
Microsoft, not Linux.
I'd also argue that doing another full rebuild of the OS for a 1%
performance gain on a single architecture is not a particularly
production use of resources.
The 1% comes from i586 -> i686; SSE2 would be additional on top of
that. But given the vehement opposition, I can see dropping the SSE2
requirement. I'm still fairly convinced that going to i686 is the right
move - we really don't support i586 as a practical matter, and even
the Geode should still work with that. Furthermore, it's likely we'll
have a mass rebuild for LZMA support and/or debuginfo changes, so it's
no additional cost.
Bill