On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 3:17 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9 September 2017 at 01:46, Daniel Hopson
<subsentient(a)universe2.us> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
The first question that has to be asked when doing any of this is how
does this fit in with the Fedora mindset of pushing boundaries and
moving forward. These architectures have not been supported by Fedora
in over a decade and a lot of software inside of Fedora would probably
not work in such a hardware setting.
The second question is how much work are you going to put into making
i586 work? The people who got other architectures in place have gone
into building the os on their own for a while to get most of the kinds
out of the way and to see what was broken before proposing it to be
included.
If you have good answers to both of them and can show that i586 can be
built then I expect it would be possible. Otherwise it would be better
to look at the distros which do have i586 support and concentrate
there.
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/fdcf90f02738ead4fd7722...
Good point. I think we should take this in 'baby steps'. First, we
stabilize i686 and then we can look at expanding, if there is
sufficient interest. If we take on too much, we risk getting the boot.
The question as to 'how does this help move Fedora forward', is
something we need to keep in mind. While I don't think there is
anything about x86_32 that explicitly moves Fedora forward, I believe
that supporting as much hardware as we can enables other innovations
that will push Fedora forward. Particularly since these older
platforms are still sufficient for developing most types of
applications. Plus, you'll notice a memory leak on a machine with
512MB of RAM much quicker than one with 16GB. ;-)
The point you raise is important to keep in mind because if we hold
the rest of the community back the community won't hesitate to move
on.
jeff
--
Jeff Backus
jeff.backus(a)gmail.com
http://github.com/jsbackus