Haha! 99% of the routing machines in our network (141.85.0.0 - class B
network) are linux machines. And most of them _are_ 386's, exactly because
it's all that is needed, and because it's cheap. Take a break yourself,
linux is used in _lots_ of places as a router, because it does routing +
firewall + masquerading + routing protocols + proxy + whatever. If you
need all of these in one cheap box, linux is the way to go.
> Again my point is not to waste time developing for obsolete
> hardware.
I wonder when was the last time somebody wrote 386 specific code in
arch/i386 ... As I see it, most development there are pentium
optimizations, at most (the tcp/ip checksumming routines were specifically
designed for best performance on pentium, afaik, for example).
The rest of the code is pretty generic.
> Let me also put it in a financial perspective. Our company is
> developing a distributed IDE. It so happens that Linux is the target
> platform. I would hate to explain to my boss that the bright side of
> the situation is that "Linux works on a 386".
Why would you have to explain that is beyond my imagination. We have
2.0.30 which runs pretty cool both on some old 386 _and_ pentiums.
> Regards,
>
> Y.
Matei