Changing the default 32-bit x86 arch for Fedora 12

[Peter Robinson]

>> PLEASE do not do this.
>>
>> If we stop supporting Pentium II and Pentium III, I have to buy a whole
>> lot of new hardware.   Dead serious.
>>
>> Could we do i686 as a secondary arch, and swap with i386 further in the
>> future?
>
> While I understand you may have a lot of older hardware, the point of a
> *seconday* architecture is that it's not the primary architecture target.
> Even if we didn't split off older CPUs, we're still primarily targeting
> newer machines.

Except there is no proper support for secondary arches yet. See the
discussion and the decision on PPC and moving it to a secondary arch.
Maybe that should be postponed until there is a proper secondary arch
and all the policies etc associated with it. It seems most of the CPUs
exlcuded from the list above are probably 64 bit capable anyway
(excluding the P4 netburst stuff which have their own perf issues, the
earlier gens of centrino, and atom).

I still have an Athon32, XO and another geode machine (Fit-PC - which
are still shipping with geode models). The Fit-PC I got because it was
tiny, silent, uses about 5 watts of power and had 2 onboard ethernet
which makes it ideal for router/fw stuff.

Peter