* "Martin v. L?wis" (martin@v.loewis.de) wrote: > Lars Wirzenius wrote: > >So using a 386 as a router and firewall, which it is perfectly capable > >of hardwarewise > > Is that really the case? Yes. > a) Is anybody actually doing this, today? Yes. > b) Do you then have 10MB or 100MB ethernet in that computer? > Can you even put a 100MB ethernet card into the computer? > Does it have PCI? If you've only got a 1.5Mb/s max connection to the internet a 386 can handle it just fine. You can put 100Mb/s ethernet cards in a 386 using the ISA bus and a 3c515 card. It can't get 100Mb/s speeds of course but as I recall it can get above 10Mb/s. Again, not that it matters if the uplink speed is slow. > I really don't recall the answers to these questions, since it > is such a long time that I have last seen a real 386 machine. I've got a 386 here that I'm not currently using but is still in perfectly working order. A friend of mine has a 386 being used as a firewall under 2.4 for his ADSL connection. I've got a 486 which is currently being used as a mail relay server (which obviously needs security updates) and an original pentium box as my gateway. My dad has a 486 for his firewall on his ADSL connection which I set up for him. 386's seemed to be faster than m68k machines from what I saw when I last had my m68k box up and running. > If there is enough userbase for an i386 distribution, > I wouldn't mind if an i386 port was maintained separately. > However, I really think it would be a good thing if Linux > could, in general, assume 486+ (or perhaps even Pentium+). Having multiple ports based on intelligent break-points in the x86 architecture could make sense. I say intelligent break-points because it might make more sense to have a '386' version and a '586' version and that's it rather than have one for every arch type gcc has. I'm sure there's a tradeoff between disk space and buildd time and other factors and if a given arch really improved things that much. Stephen
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