> On Thu, 27 Aug 1998, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 26, 1998 at 07:22:13PM -0700, Dan Hollis wrote:
> > > I guess we should drop support for 386 and 486 too...
> > No - because support the 386/486 isn't costing us much.
>
> Bad example. How about fpu emulation. After all, everyone has builtin FPU
> these days! So lets just drop FPU emulation completely and see how many
> people complain.
Well, dropping 486 support is a bad thing to do. I know about zillions of
486 used as routers, terminal servers and such. Please keep in mind that
a good equipped 486 under linux easily outperforms M$ with a higher CPU at
least in several aspects. I also use a 100MHz 486 with 32MB at home and it
does all I need for work and fast enough. Now, most (where do you place
486sx?) have FPU though.
I simply don't have the time to go through the pain of building a PCI
based system as rock solid as this EISA system (probably this is just
impossible anyway).
For 386, I don't know any directly, but I can imagine many out there.
I think, as long as the support for those machines does not inhibit any
new feature which is A REAL MUST, you should leave it in. I don't see any
such thing at the moment.
After all, most of the people making high input to linux are students and
people with not much money for there hobby (but time). They'll not spent
much time getting the latest hardware to work but more coding for linux.
These will use such hardware. Also, this is why you won't be able to drop
support.
This has been discussed often already...
Michael.
--Michael Weller: eowmob@exp-math.uni-essen.de, eowmob@ms.exp-math.uni-essen.de, or even mat42b@spi.power.uni-essen.de. If you encounter an eowmob account on any machine in the net, it's very likely it's me.
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