> Recently, Intel has begun proposing some security improvements for
> i686 that make use of the NOPL instruction -- and that, I think, could
> cause support for the Geode LX to fall away from many Linux operating
> systems because there's a fair and very reasonable argument that
> adding security features for the majority of users outweighs
> supporting an old and unusual CPU.
The `i386` port of Debian is basically dedicated to old machines (the
newer machines are expected to use the `amd64` port), so I suspect the
"works on old machines" argument will tend to prevail.
This said, as Charles points out, support for some old machines is
slowly eroding due to the slowly increasing RAM requirements. Not sure
how many GeodesLX machines are sufficiently beefy to run
Bookworm acceptably.
I was still able to use Debian on a (headless, armhf) 512MB machine
without too much suffering two years ago, but I suspect that less than
that might be impractical.
Stefan
