Re: [Devil-Linux-discuss] Anyone running a 486? Was: openswan

[Bruce S. <bw...@ar...>]

> > Technology moves on.  Is a 486 even fast enough to keep up 
> > with today's broadband speeds?  What's the point of paying
> > for a 6MB cable modem when your 486 with ISA NIC's can only
> > deliver a fraction of that speed?
>
> Actually, the 16 bit ISA bus theoretically delivers about 16 MBytes /
> second, and the 8 bit ISA bus, about 8 MBytes / second.  That cable
> modem is 6 M*bits* / second.  A 486 with an ISA bus is more than capable
> of routing 10 Mbit traffic.  In fact it can easily route multiple 10Mbit
> segments.  That said, my old 486 has never run DL as it has no CD drive
> and only 16MB RAM.  Last I had it up it ran LRP from a floppy and routed
> 4Mbit cable modem traffic.

That may be true in theory, but my experience shows otherwise.  The last
time I used an ISA NIC (on a 586), it couldn't keep up with a single T1.
Maybe there are other ISA NIC chipsets that do a better job, don't know.

> As far as 486 vs 586 DL goes, is there any benchmarking showing the i586
> version is better, (smaller/faster), than i386 compiled code?
> 
> I recently saw some info stating some Gentoo users had found compiling
> their kernels with gcc size optimization flags gave better performance
> than using the speed optimization flags.

AFAIK, we don't have any benchmarks.  I just thought I'd throw this out
to see if anyone was still running a 486.

Personally I don't care if we drop the 486 or the 586 version, since I
run the 686 version on all of my DL boxes.  It seems some people do care
about the 486, so I guess we should drop the 586 version of DL.   :-(

 - BS