> >One of our firewall/routers was a 386 with 20Mb Seagate ST205 MFM drives.
> >Its had a disk upgrade to a large (mostly empty) disk as the 205 was starting
> >to die of old age
>
> They really don't make bad machines for routers and dialin lines. We have
> two 386s with just a network card and some modems acting as dialin
> terminals.
> But I really see no reason to have 386 support (and I'd say drop math
> emulation too so that people can use FP in the kernel) in the 2.1.x and
> later kernels. None of the new features are really worth implementing on
> such old hardware. Is anyone really going to have an IPv6 modem pool? And
> if you're doing IPv6 routing wouldn't you want a 486 anyways?
Speaking as the proud owner of a 486SX system (with no FP) I must say
that I object strenuously to that remark. This box was brand-new just a
couple of years ago and does its job very well. If you want to force
people to upgrade everything they own, go get a job with Microsoft.
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer MWOOD@INDYVAX.IUPUI.EDU
Those who will not learn from history are doomed to reimplement it.