Dropping pre-i686 from the archive

Matthias Klose doko at ubuntu.com
Thu Jan 12 08:00:05 GMT 2006


Matt Zimmerman schrieb:
> On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 10:13:06AM -0500, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> 
>>One of the last issues on the ToolchainRoadmapNg spec to be resolved is
>>whether or not we should keep support for older than i686 processors.
>>The issue arose during BOFs at both UDU and UBZ for two main reasons:
>>[...]
>>2) i486 for small / embedded systems like routers is an ideal target for
>>µbuntu.
> 
> 
> As a user of just such an embedded system with Ubuntu, my personal bias is
> to preserve this compatibility.  My understanding is that we would gain the
> following in exchange for abandoning support for these low-end platforms:
> 
> - Some simplicity in glibc packaging (no more libc6-i686)
> 
> - The possibility of a small performance benefit for higher-end systems,
>   though this is notoriously tricky to measure and we have no useful data

besides an eventually small performance hit, we could you use the same 
target for code generation that everybody else uses and gets more tested 
by upstream. AFAIK Ubuntu and Debian are the only distributions 
generating code for i486.

   Matthias



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