Changing the default 32-bit x86 arch for Fedora 12

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> said:
> Because that's significantly less of our userbase. I'd love to have
> harder numbers, but we're still talking about a set of CPUs that
> (outside of corner cases like the Geode and C3) ceased production
> anywhere from 4 (Athlon) to 6 (P3) to 10 (P2) years ago.

But they are still useful CPUs with Linux (maybe not so much with
Windows, but that's just another reason to support them for Fedora!).

At work, I have a couple of DNS/RADIUS/email relay servers that are
dual-PIII.  I have several firewalls that are old Celeron (no SSE2).  My
desktop that I'm writing this on is an Athlon XP.  I have a personal
file/mail server that is an Athlon XP.

All of these systems are working just fine at the jobs they do.  For
example, one dual-PIII is handling 3-6 email relays per second and
150-250 recursive DNS queries per second (24 hour averages).  The disk
I/O for the email is the biggest limiting factor.

Removing support for still-functional hardware is a trademark of
Microsoft, not Linux.

I'd also argue that doing another full rebuild of the OS for a 1%
performance gain on a single architecture is not a particularly
production use of resources.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.