> Additionally, FESCo would like us to establish a minimum level of hardware supported. We are
> working on this list and will follow up with you once we have it completed. In the interim, we did
> want to address a couple of concerns that were passed along by Stephen Smoogen:
>
> * We have decided to drop support for PAE, so please feel free to disable it on the next build
> * We have decided to continue to support pre-SSE2 hardware for the time being

I'm very glad to hear this. Also makes me wonder if, since we're supporting non-SSE2 hardware, maybe we should retarget for i586, for the maximum compatibility?

x86_32 is, at this point, useful to people who want a modern OS on ancient hardware, and the more ancient of hardware we're able to support, the more use this could potentially have. This would allow supporting a number of VIA, AMD, and even old Intel CPUs.

Since we're going to deal with the quagmire of packages with sse2 as inline assembly already, and since many of these packages are the same ones that have problems with i586 in my experience (for example ffmpeg, or it used to, and mesa), why not aim for maximum compatibility?
There is a performance hit for switching to i586 (which just drops CMOV/conditional move instructions), but the same is true for supporting SSE2, and I think at this point people are far more concerned with compatibility than a 2% or so performance penalty.

I might be wrong.
Just putting it out there.