We run lot of P100 and P233 with hostap to provide internet access to our customers with 2.4Ghz wi-fi. And some customers have P200,233MMX as firewalls/mail servers/proxy.
I think 386 boxes are really slow ... and the admins of that boxes <again I THINK> have faster boxes to build specific packages.. but maybe not ability to rebuild all base packages and apt/dpkg/libs itself. But 486's DX (DX-50/DX2-66/DX4-100) and 586's are faster boxes to do something with them .. and inexpensives to put in a roof of building .. and being hit by storms =) .... and don't have another boxes to rebuild all packages. Just my 2 cents []'s <I'm subscribed to this list .. but with another address ;o) > On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 10:45, Stephen Stafford wrote: > On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 03:28:02PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > > On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Stephen Stafford wrote: > > > On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 02:25:52PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > > > > What about perusing the INT 6 idea, and going all the way up to i686? > > > While I support the removal of 386 support, I absolutely and strenuously > > > object to going to 686. 686 isn't all that old at all (1997 IIRC), and I > > > use a nunber of 4/586 machines still (I have one 486 which I use for > > > embedded development and 3 P100 boxen which are used for various things > > > like > > > CVS server, gateway/firewall, testing various things). > > Note that my idea was about patching the kernel that so the newer opcodes > > would be emulated in software. Everything would still work even on a 386, > > just slower -- and the speed decrease can be removed by running apt-build. > > I'm still not convinced. Your argument works just as well in reverse. If > people running >=686 want to they are perfectly capable of building the > packages to take advantage of it themselves, and FAR more able to afford the > computrons to do so (recompiling most of a system on a 486 will never be my > idea of fun...on (say) a 1GHz machine, it's far easier to do) > > I'm also still not convinced of the usefulness of these optinisations per > architecture at non-high loads. I submit that a 486 is FAR more likely to > be running at high load than a 1GHz machine. The 486 can far less afford > the performance hit from emulating instructions in software than a 1GHz > machine can by not having the small optimisations built by default. > > This basically comes down to "will a significant portion of our userbase > suffer if we do this?" Personally I think the answer is "yes". You > obviously have a different viewpoint here :) > > Cheers, > > Stephen >