Re: Dropping 386 support
peter green wrote:
> calling stuff i386 when it will not run natively on a 386 seems like asking
> for confustion to me
True, but we're way to close to a release to fix *that*. And I'm not
sure that we could easily fix binary-i386 at all..
> why and when was this instruction emulation needed in the first place (that
> is why and when was the userland changed to need it)
Looking in that archive, this was first discussed in April 2003:
<http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/17/>
Debian to drop Support for i386? Jochen Friedrich [30]noted that
due to GCC 3.2 the new libstdc++5 library requires an 80486
processor or higher, the old 80386 on which Linux was started, is
no longer supported. Therefore Matthias Klose [31]wondered whether
Debian should further support the i386 target.
30. http://bugs.debian.org/185662
31. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0304/msg01895.html
<http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/18/>
Dropping Support for i386? Nathanael Nerode [17]investigated the
i386 problem and discovered that to maintain binary compatibility
with C++ packages from other distributions, Debian needs to use the
i486 version of atomicity.h supplied by GCC. Dagfinn Ilmari
Mannsåker [18]wrote a small [19]script that compares the speed of
OpenSSL code for i386 versus i486 on a P-III Mobile.
17. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0304/msg02112.html
18. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0304/msg02134.html
19. http://ilmari.org/sslcmp
Another URL that was inspired by and mentioned on the debian-release
mailing list: <http://people.debian.org/~joey/pr/3.1/i386.html>
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Joey
--
Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it! -- Mark Twain
Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
Reply to: