New CPUTYPE default for i386 port

[Julian Elischer]

On 10/7/19 9:30 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 8:09 AM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
>
>> The 4801s, on the other hand, seems to be indestructible...
>>
> So the question we need to answer, that Rod brought up, is "Are there
> enough machines that can boot FreeBSD release images that would otherwise
> fail with some weird error that we need to deploy counter measures"?
>
> I did a survey of the old 'desktop / server' hardware available on EBAY. If
> you look at all Pentiums, then the number of machines that (a) are new
> enough to support CDROM booting and (b) have enough memory are << 1% (I
> found 1 out of 250 that I looked at). So from that perspective, things are
> fine: machines that might be able to boot today's 13 snapshots are quite
> rare in this space.... rare enough to not worry apart from release notes.
> There's likely some level of error in this survey, but the bound of
> uncertainty here is such that more accurate data likely wouldn't change the
> conclusion.
>
> However, there's a number of embedded products that were so popular in the
> community that there might be people that want to run 13.0 when it is
> released. That's a fair point that I'd not considered.
>
> The question becomes: are people using only the release images on these
> boxes? Or are they rolling their own?
>
> If they are rolling their own, release notes is all that's needed.
>
> If they are using the release images, then we may want to give at least
> some warning. These machines are MBR/GPT BIOS booted. So we could put a
> warning into boot2 (maybe room), gptboot (plenty of room) or cdboot (has
> room) that would trigger on 486 and 586 machines. I'd want to turn it off
> were I deploying these machines, or off in general outside the release env.
> It would limit the amount of code we'd have to compile specially, but would
> be the most reliable way of getting a message to any affected user. That's
> likely the best we could do here.

I think the answer is that as long as we can still generate the 
images, the default is not so important.

But the size of system needed to actually generate such a system with 
the modern compiler etc may make self hosting a bit of an issue. 
Unfortunately I deleted the very first post in the thread, so I can't 
remember the reason he gave but I presume that the usual reasons 
apply.  Compiling as a pre-pentum results in reduced performance for 
any machine built inthe last 20 years. The only comment that I haven't 
seen made is that pre-686 class machines are possibly not dropping as 
a percentage f 32 bit chipsets as nearly all machines sold for 
desktop/taptop use these days are 64 bit, meaning that 32 bit is 
limited to embedded, and I can not say what percentage of modern 32 
bit systems are the ultra-low power pre-686 types, as I have not been 
following that market.

I run a soekris 5501 but i do have alternatives, and it is running 9.1 
I think. I have no real plans to massively upgrade it, and if I did I 
would not compile on that.. it would take a month including ports.

Julian

>
> Warner
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