Re: Processor requirements

[Michal Suchanek]

On 11/18/05, Jonathan S. Shapiro <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 22:53 -0300, Leonardo Lopes Pereira wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:07:37 -0500
> > "Jonathan S. Shapiro" <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > This is a good question, If I need to say what kind of computers we
> > need to support TODAY, I think that still important the support of
> > i486 and i586. I do not know where do you live, but they are very used
> > here, in Brazil. But if you think that this project will support
> > computers of 2015 (I think that I am very optmist), I beleave that
> > support to i586 is needed.
>
> Leonardo:
>
> The performance gap between the fastest i486 and a current Pentium-IV is
> nearly three decimal orders of magnitude. Regardless of what instruction
> set Hurd compiles for, there is simply no way that this large a range
> can be effectively supported by a single set of applications.
>
> Try running FC4 on a 486 and you'll see what I'm talking about.
>
I tried running current Ubuntu on a Pentium (I) box. There is still
some room for expansion, it has only 64M ram, and the board can do
128M with additional cache module. But it is not just slow, it is
_very slow_ when running gnome. On the other hand, icewm works quite
well, it just takes long to boot the box.

It is weird to put three boxes in line, knowing that the CPU speed of
one is the FSB speed of the next..

btw, there are those K6 boxes that are still usable but aren't full i686 iirc.

> I'm not saying that dropping the 486 is a desirable thing. I'm saying
> that we are kidding ourselves if we think it's going to be done well.

If it takes some years to finish the hurd, i486 is going to be
obsolete completely by then. And if the kernel can be later ported to
the older hardware  without changing  applications there is no problem
with dropping support for some less frequently used hardware anyway.

Thanks

Michal

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