Re: Q for all candidates: (Old) Architecture Support

[Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>]

* Margarita Manterola (margamanterola@gmail.com) [100318 21:03]:
> I would like to support as many architectures as possible.  We cannot
> deny the passage of time, however, and so we must accept that some
> architectures are bound to stop being supported.  This even happened
> some years ago with 386.  We still call the "common" architecture
> i386, but a real 386 computer wouldn't be able to run the current
> systems, since the kernel requires at least 486.

And that happened before we removed m68k. (Technically it's not the
kernel, but the way we set atomic locks within glibc - there used to
be an patch lingering around for the kernel to emulate that behaviour,
but using the patch opens an trivial root exploit, that's why we
refused to use the patch.)


Andi