On 09.10.22 08:32, Neal Gompa wrote:
If we're going to bring up the environment, the computers made more than ten years ago are vastly more energy inefficient and pull more energy than most computers you can buy in the last five years.
I'd question that, at least with the given timeframes. My (not hypothetical) "server" machine at home, running 24/7 is a Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo E730 machine. Small form factor professional desktop machine. Intel Core2 Duo E8500. 8GB RAM. 2 disks with rotating rust, 2TB and 4TB, spun down approx 95% of the time. 2 SSDs, 512GB and 2TB. On-board gigabit ethernet, pcie gigabit ethernet card, pci DVB-S2 card. Running vdr, openvpn, ssh, owncloud, some KVM vm occationally, NFS server, dhcp+dns+tftp server (dnsmasq). When idling (which is is probably about 90% of the time), it draws about 30-35 Watts. Given the hardware in there (2x GBit ethernet, DVB-S2 card), there is not a huge part of the energy consumption that can be accounted to CPU / chipset. The improvements with energy consumptions in the last 10 years have mostly been in the areas of "connected standby" (windows only AFAIK), faster suspend and resume etc, which all is a non-issue here. I have been involved with handling of and caring/developing for notebook computers running linux for 20 years now, and the great improvements to battery life have been the intel Centrino Platform (pentium M, the return to the old P3 architecture) and then again the intel core/core2 platforms (where, AFAICT also the "we switch peripherals into low power modes" stuff started to be actually of benefit), but the last 10 years have mostly improved the battery technology and not really reduced power usage in a significant way. It is a different issue if the CPU is actually doing stuff and running at full speed with all cores loaded fully, but this is in my experience a rather rare event (and on machines that are expected to run 100% CPU all the time usually even the basic power saving settings are disabled for alleged performance reasons).
Raising the baseline to x86_64-v2 also has the effect of raising the generational baseline to something that is generally useful for contemporary Linux system software.
I would go with that argument if it was true. Running a linux XFCE desktop on the 8GB Thinkpad x200s (core-2 duo ultra low power 1,8GHz?) is getting a tad laggy, but it's mostly the tab-switching in the browsers or stuff like that which I'd actually guess is due to the graphics stuff, but it is well usable still. "Linux system software" (which, in my book, is kernel, system services, most simple server daemons) runs perfectly well on such a system. If we were to "remove support for hardware that prevents systems being useful", then we would remove support for rotating-rust-drives. Adding a SSD to an even more than 10 year old system makes it from "unbearably bad" to "neatly usable again" in no time with only a small investment. Even my trusty Toughbook CF-51 (intel centrino, Banias 1,6GHz, 2GB RAM) became usable again after adding an ide-to-m2 adapter and a m2.sata drive, and it has a REAL SERIAL PORT!!! ;-) Have fun anyway. seife -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman