Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Peter Jeremy]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 10:57:56PM +0100, Martin Nilsson wrote:
>This discussion is just like when the i386 support was removed from the 
>GENERIC kernel, a lot of noise about old systems that wouldn't be able 
>to run (or benefit) from FreeBSD 5 anyway.

There's a big jump between i386 systems and Pentium I/II systems.  I
agree that any "standard" i386 syystem would be very unlikely to be
able to run a generic FreeBSD kernel - the ones that are left are in
embedded systems where they need customised install environments
already.

An old P-I or P-II system is still perfectly adequate to run FreeBSD -
and will be for some time yet.  They make ideal firewalls, print
servers, terminal servers, low-end fileservers etc.  (My home firewall
is a 486).  I agree that you wouldn't want to run OpenOffice or
Mozilla on one but that doesn't make them unusable.

>I fail to see the difference in required labour between creating two 
>floppies or a CD-R/RW disc. Most new machines ship with CD-RW drives 
>today, the only boxes that can't boot from a CD are early Pentium1 class 
>and frankly why run 5.x or 6.x on those?

In a corporate environment, machines are very likely to not include a
CD-RW (and might not even include a CD-ROM).  As for why run 5.x, how
about:
1) because you want some of the features in 5.x - a fileserver could
   benefit enormously from ACLs, UFS2 and snapshots (to name a few)
   even if it's only an old P-I.
2) for support.  4.x will probably be officially de-supported sometime
   in 2005.  At that point, I either need to accept the overhead of
   handling (eg) security fixes myself or migrate to 5.x
   
Peter