cvs commit: src/lib/libc/i386/net htonl.S ntohl.S

[David Schultz]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 October 2004 10:43 am, you wrote:
> > In message: <20041019073145.GA29746 at thingy.tbd.co.nz>
> >
> >             Andrew Thompson <andy at fud.org.nz> writes:
> > : > I am afraid that recompiling a kernel on i386 will require several
> > : > days.
> > :
> > : Chicken and the egg. To support i386 it must be recompiled, so you would
> > : have to do it on another box anyway.
> >
> > The only people that will seriously want to use i386 these days are
> > the folks that build embedded systems.  Those you have to build on
> > some host then deploy to the target system.

Yes, and very few of those folks are likely to want a relatively
large, non-realtime, monolithic, multi-threaded OS kernel, much
less a userland that even vaguely resembles a standard FreeBSD
installation.

Every time this issue comes up, someone points out that in fact,
FreeBSD still runs on the 80386 that they just threw out.
However, nobody ever presents an important reason for *wanting* to
run FreeBSD on an 80386.

> > There are some benefits to having i386 in the tree.  However, there
> > are also a number of different places in the tree where things are
> > sub-optimal because we still have support for i386 in there.  The
> > desire to remove them is to make FreeBSD go faster on more modern
> > hardware.
> 
> I think 6.0 is the place to drop 80386, not 5.x.  I'm already working on a p4 
> branch (jhb_no386) to remove 80396 support from HEAD, but I think 5.x should 
> be left as is in this regard.

Nice.  \me can't wait for the day when developers are no longer
required to spend time and effort to support anything older than a PPro.