Selection of roadmap for i386 platform End-of-Life (EOL)

[B. Estrade]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 1:34 PM, John Marino <dragonflybsd at marino.st> wrote:

> I hate responding to this negatively because you obviously put in a lot of
> thought and time into the message.  The problem is that it's missing the
> point, as well as goes down the "let's save i386 path" that I tried to ward
> off.
>
> See below.
>
>
> On 5/1/2013 19:50, Just a Normal Person wrote:
>
>> I don't think there is a really good reason to remove support for
>> 32-bit x86 machines in my opinion. As it was pointed out before, it is
>> not like they are not capable of running DragonFly well; granted, for
>> the project running on machines with less than 256 megabytes of RAM
>> may not be a priority, but there are a lot of machines with>= 256 MB
>> of memory and they're 32-bit x86.
>>
>
> Machines running on less than 256M are not a priority.  True.
> 32-bit machines can have more than 4G on them, but only 4G is accessible,
> which is a lot.  However, the discussion isn't about memory.


FWIW, FreeBSD and NetBSD support PAE (physical address extensions) which
allow processes to take advantage of 32 bit hardware that can support
greater than 4 GB of memory. FWIW, OpenBSD appears to not.

If PAE is not part of the direction of DragonflyBSD, then it might be moot
as to whether 32 bit is supported or not. You might be better of using
FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, or even Windows.

Brett

<snip>
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