On Jul 8, 2014, at 9:31 AM, Konstantin Olchanski <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 08, 2014 at 01:19:58AM -0700, Jim McCarthy wrote: >> On Mon, 7 Jul 2014, Connie Sieh wrote: >>>> >>>> I note that only X86-64 is available; have I missed something about >>>> supported ISAs, or will there also be an IA-32 port/distribution as >>>> well? >>>> >>>> Yasha Karant >>> >>> TUV is only releasing X86-64 . >>> >>> -Connie Sieh >> >> Is this for TUV "v7 ALPHA", or is this to become 'the new normal' going >> forward ? >> > > My best guess is - there is no 32-bit RHEL7 because "they" decided to use the > XFS filesystem by default, but XFS only works on 64-bit systems (something > about stack size or page size or something obscure like that). > > This is a wise decision if you consider that all serious UNIX machines went > 64-bit back in the late-1990-ies (SGI, DEC, etc), > and that all new PC hardware is 64-bit capable. The dropping of architectures has caused issues in the past. With 5, due to the 7 year support lifecycle, a decision was made to go to version 6. Which caused issues with a couple of our supported platforms, which used the Pentium M processor. Intel, in their wisdom, included the PAE mode in the Pentium Pro, but in the early Pentium M's, it wasn't supported. We ended up rebuilding the kernel without PAE support (and went through the work of creating new installation DVDs with this kernel) to support these platforms. A few files in the kernel would not compile without modifications, since it was a non supported configuration. If we had known that the support range would be extended to 10 years, we could have delayed this issue for another 3 years. The TUV decided that a workstation/server environment wouldn't be used on older CPUs that were originally designed for laptop usage. At this point, they have also decided that workstations/servers won't be running on 32 bit only Intel systems any more. Reducing support and development costs. The systems I work on use the distribution because of the need for long term security support. It sure beats worrying about Windows licensing, and activation issues for computers that aren't connected to the internet.
