Once upon a time, Bill Nottingham <notting(a)redhat.com> said:
Because that's significantly less of our userbase. I'd love
to have
harder numbers, but we're still talking about a set of CPUs that
(outside of corner cases like the Geode and C3) ceased production
anywhere from 4 (Athlon) to 6 (P3) to 10 (P2) years ago.
But they are still useful CPUs with Linux (maybe not so much with
Windows, but that's just another reason to support them for Fedora!).
At work, I have a couple of DNS/RADIUS/email relay servers that are
dual-PIII. I have several firewalls that are old Celeron (no SSE2). My
desktop that I'm writing this on is an Athlon XP. I have a personal
file/mail server that is an Athlon XP.
All of these systems are working just fine at the jobs they do. For
example, one dual-PIII is handling 3-6 email relays per second and
150-250 recursive DNS queries per second (24 hour averages). The disk
I/O for the email is the biggest limiting factor.
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.
--
Chris Adams <cmadams(a)hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.