Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2019 10:30:27 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: Lev Serebryakov <lev@freebsd.org>, "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd-rwg@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>, "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: New CPUTYPE default for i386 port Message-ID: <CANCZdfr00NFPdbnOdaXoZPbbj%2BVJVRXmQcoD3Y=ewS78wmkL2A@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <18250.1570457337@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <CANCZdfqL2LD_Yu49XMid-G21w-HKSDA4yW4Wi_uEW37rAG9E2Q@mail.gmail.com> <201910060322.x963Mwo1065732@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> <CANCZdfra0r=GYF5KSHqGuhNQq6RTXCBu8r9j3YfGc4iVmTsNag@mail.gmail.com> <89501a69-ea37-7016-5ccb-286ff65b2e2a@FreeBSD.org> <18250.1570457337@critter.freebsd.dk>
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On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 8:09 AM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@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. Warner
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