From owner-freebsd-arch  Tue Nov 14 10:52:52 2000
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From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
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Subject: Re: RANDOMDEV inspired realitycheck regarding i386/i486...
To: ben@FreeBSD.ORG (Ben Smithurst)
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 18:52:40 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: phk@FreeBSD.ORG (Poul-Henning Kamp), arch@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <20001114144613.B88888@platinum.scientia.demon.co.uk> from "Ben Smithurst" at Nov 14, 2000 02:46:13 PM
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> > If no /entropy is found it takes a full minute to do the randomdev
> > seeding during boot on a P5/133.
> > 
> > Has anybody run a 486 or 386 under current recently ?
> 
> Yes, my only -current machine is a 486.  I gave up waiting for the
> randomdev seeding to complete.  It's lucky I'm only a docs committer and
> therefore not terribly important I run -current I suppose. :-)

I can only risk -current on old hardware that I don't have
anything important stored on, and that means 386 or 486 class
hardware.

I think that dropping support for 386/486 would be a retreat
up-market.  Is FreeBSD so marginalized that it needs to do
what hard disk vendors and others have done, when their market
share is failing?  There's a good reason that most of the
proprietary hardware vendors are retreating into large scale
parallel systems... but it's not like FreeBSD is trying to
support 40% margins on sales, like they are.

My two cents says this is a problem with the design of randomdev,
and not a problem with 386/486 hardware.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.


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