Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 04:20:19 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Any ideas why we can't even boot a i386 ? Message-ID: <a05200f93ba8484cd24a9@[10.0.1.4]> In-Reply-To: <p05200f2cba8473a40520@[128.113.24.47]> References: <XFMail.20030227160443.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <p05200f29ba84405d006d@[128.113.24.47]> <20030227235558.GA1596@dhcp01.pn.xcllnt.net> <p05200f2cba8473a40520@[128.113.24.47]>
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At 9:38 PM -0500 2003/02/27, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>> It's never good to add to your release cycle something you don't
>> build/validate during development. Releases are painful enough
>> that you don't want to turn them into testbeds. If it's not
>> worth testing during development, it's not worth releasing...
>
> Okay, that also makes good sense. But if that is true, then maybe
> we should officially tell our users that they *must* stay with the
> 4.x-series if they are running 386 hardware. I do think that the
> project has plenty of work with 5.x-series, particularly as we
> try to add sparc64, ppc, and maybe more hardware platforms.
I disagree. We should tell them that 5.x may technically run on
i386 systems, but that it is optimized for i486 and above, and that
if they want to get it to run on i386 machines there is a significant
amount of additional work that they would need to go through in order
to make it happen.
We can go so far as to tell them that using 5.x on i386 hardware
is unsupported, and if they have any problems they shouldn't bother
reporting them to us.
However, I would encourage people to do further testing of 5.x on
i386 systems and try to keep it working, and I would be very
disappointed if anyone made any proclamations that people *MUST*
stick with 4.x (or earlier) if they're using i386 systems.
If you're going to go that route, then make sure to actually
remove all the i386 code from 5.x so that it simply is no longer
possible to make it work at all. Actually, this might be a good
exercise anyway, to help teach us just what parts can be disentangled
and what parts would need to be watched more closely.
But don't tell people that they *MUST* stick with 4.x on i386,
unless you physically remove all the i386 code from the 5.x tree.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+
!w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)
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