Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 11 Jun 1997 11:28:59 +0200 | From | Martin Mares <> | Subject | Re: "obsolete" hardware |
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Hi,
> Of course there is another way of looking at this. There are lots > of current and upcoming applications that do require lots of horsepower. > By the same token there are fewer and fewer (if any) applications being > written that target a 486 (let alone a 386) as a minimum requirement. Try > running anything X/Motif based and you'll see what I mean. If Linux > developers concentrate their attention on trying to be compatible with > obsolete hardware as opposed to taking advantage of cutting edge features > other operating systems will overtake Linux by running slower on faster > hardware - not exactly a pretty picture. > > Bottom line is I'd rather say "Linux runs faster on a quad P7" than > "Linux still runs on my 2mb 386" a year from now. A well executed design > means nothing unless it performs. Nothing PERFORMS on a 386. Lets not > loose sight of our goals here for the sake of keeping backward > compatibility. > > Take as a warning the longevity of the PC bus architecture. Would you > care to guess why we're still stuck with it? Backward compatibility. Its a > dirty word.
(1) The first problem is that if you want to remove dirty hacks for broken hardware by removing support for the _old_ hardware, you won't win as lots of new hardware are broken as well.
(2) Linux is certainly meant to offer much more than running CPU-eating X applications. Those other capabilities (including network routing and bridging) require only little CPU power and a quad P7 won't noticeably improve their performance, so why buy it instead of using an old 386 and saving $6000. Well written applications seldom need lots of CPU time.
(3) We were talking about things like FPU emulation which don't need much time to maintain -- just to keep them consistent with the rest of the kernel. And using FP in the kernel is of a small value, it would also mean saving and restoring them on every syscall or take care of saving/restoring at every use.
=> The answer is "No." Have a nice fortnight Martin
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