Dear Raphaël, Raphaël Hertzog schrieb am 20.11.2011 08:40: > On Sat, 19 Nov 2011, Ben Hutchings wrote: >> Also possibly: >> 6. DM&P/SiS Vortex86 and Vortex86SX. These supposedly have all >> 586-class features except an FPU, and we could probably keep FPU >> emulation for them. > > FWIW, I do run Debian on such systems albeit with a custom kernel. > Given those CPU tend to be used in an "embedded" context I guess > it's ok if the official kernel does not support them. But it would be > nice if Debian's userspace could be kept compatible. Not sure what this > requires though... judging from the section you quoted from Ben's e-mail, I'd say you shouldn't be affected in the short term if the FPU is really the only thing missing to make it a full 586-class CPU (of course, a further increase to a higher instruction set class would hit you). Apart from that I wonder how many "embedded" x86 CPUs (instruction set < 586) are out there. Are they still sold in current products? If so it might(!) be worth to keep compatible with them, even if that would mean an additional kernel build*. On the other hand most embedded kernels are custom build anyway, in which case "offering the tools" to build a running Debian system should be enough, right? * The question here is (again): do we have some numbers on this, that could guide the decision? If not and the assumption by the kernel maintainers is "few systems still operational run with CPUs which don't at least support 586 instructions", then I'd find it reasonable to still disable the support in the kernel. In case a huge amount of systems is still running with such CPUs chances are good, we're hearing of them then. ;-) Kind regards, Kai Wasserbäch -- E-Mail: curan@debian.org IRC: Curan Jabber: drizzt@debianforum.de URL: http://wiki.debian.org/C%C3%B9ran GnuPG: 0xE1DE59D2 0600 96CE F3C8 E733 E5B6 1587 A309 D76C E1DE 59D2
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