i686 effort is kicking off

Saturday, 18, January 2014 kbsingh builds 13 Comments

hi,

There has been reasonable interest in the i686 builds for CentOS-7. And we also need some i686 components for the x86_64 multilib payload.

As a step-1 of the process, we are going to try and workout how much of the published sources built on i686, bootstraping the builds from Fedora-19/i686 and then rebuilding onto itself. The targets setup for that are c6.99.00 ( bootstrap from f19 ) and c6.99.01 ( build over itself ). Builds for c6.99.00 are now running, you can track status at http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-build-reports/2014-January/ - with 9 build workers running,  I expect the build round to be over in just over 24 hrs.

Once that is done, we will move to c6.99.01, and fix build failures and address specific issues. For the .00 builds, were just building blind to get some binary code into the build roots, the real QA stuff will only happen into the 01 builds and onto the 02 ones.

13 thoughts on "i686 effort is kicking off"

  1. cybernet says:

    awesome, so that means that CentOS7 will be released soon ? even the beta version 🙂

  2. Stephen Jacks says:

    According to Intel, 586 was Pentium and Pentium and Pentium II were 686. Intel introduced PAE in the 686 then went to Pentium III then (then the marginally compatible Itanium then) Pentium IV in which (after AMD added x64 extensions to x86) Intel added x64 extensions. So I'm confused as to WTF i686 means: does it means Centos will regress back several generations of CPU families? Does it mean that every version of Centos before 7 was optimized for Pentium I 66MHz processors? Does this mean that Centos will no longer run on AMD processors? Please clarify, someone?

    1. Anonymous says:

      @Stephen Jacks - This is just stuff for the 32 bit x86 builds. If you're using 64-bit CentOS (most people are), then you can ignore this. 🙂

    2. Rusty says:

      An i586 class processor would be the Intel P5x architecture (Pentium), AMD K5 or Cyrix 6x86. i686 would be the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and the AMD K6.

      When a Linux version specifies i586/i686, it means the absolute bare minimum architecture it will run on in any configuration.

      Though getting the distribution to actually run on such an old processor may require recompiling the kernel and a bunch of other packages to remove optimizations made for more modern instruction sets that they don't support like SSE, 3dnow, etc.

  3. Bram says:

    An ARM build would also be nice as this seems to become popular...

  4. Brad says:

    Is there a mailing list I can track to follow the status of the 32 bit port?

    1. Akemi Yagi says:

      You may want to follow this thread on the centos-devel mailing list:

      http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2014-September/011868.html

  5. Todd says:

    Any sort of ETA for the 32 bit version of CentOS 7?

  6. Akemi Yagi says:

    An update from Johnny Hughes:

    CentOS-7 i686 Arch

    "CentOS-7 i686 Arch is coming along nicely. We should have a tree, install ISO and Live ISO next week to test with the QA team."

  7. c.bucher says:

    i would have a bunch of Pentium II PCs to set up and don't really care about 6 (using 5.11 for prod and happily testing around 7 since a few months on x86_64)
    is there a way to partake in the Q&A process?

  8. Dave says:

    Is the i686 port dead?

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