Re: Defaulting to i686 for the Debian i386 architecture

[Mats Erik Andersson <mats.andersson@gisladisker.se>]

Söndag den 4:e october 2015, klockan 11:55, skrev Steven Chamberlain:
> 
> I have a fanatical preference for compatibility over performance.  So
> I prefer not to lose support for 586, but I don't know how practical
> it would be for libc maintainers to do that only for kfreebsd.
> 
> kfreebsd-i386 has 686 (with SMP) and 486 kernel flavours.
> 
>     cpu0: Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by National Semi ("Geode by NSC" 586-class) 333 MHz
>     cpu0: FPU,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,CX8,PGE,CMOV,MMX,MMXX,3DNOW2,3DNOW
> 
> kfreebsd-i386's particular niche is supporting ancient platforms like
> these and making them still useful.  And that would be especially
> important to me, if Debian GNU/Linux (and Ubuntu, Fedora etc.) no longer
> worked on them.

The PC Engines ALIX systems (http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm) are
still very much commercial. One system, presently running FreeBSD
in a very reliable manner, reports

  CPU: Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS (498.06-MHz 586-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0x5a2  Family = 0x5  Model = 0xa  Stepping = 2
  Features=0x88a93d<FPU,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,CX8,SEP,PGE,CMOV,CLFLUSH,MMX>
  AMD Features=0xc0400000<MMX+,3DNow!+,3DNow!>
  real memory  = 268435456 (256 MB)
  avail memory = 235163648 (224 MB)

It would be a sad thing to loose the possibility for running
contemporary Debian on such a system!

Best regards,
  Mats Erik Andersson