Supported CPUs'

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 14:30:33 +0000,
   Frank Murphy <frankly3d at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Does test@ fedora give a heads up,
>when cpus are no longer supported.
>eg kernel-3-15* will no longer support
>AMD AM2, Intel whatever

Generally there has been some notice. There was a significant discussion 
when we stopped building 586 kernels and what options were used for 686 
builds.

I don't think we had an announcement here when upstream dropped 386 
support, but we weren't doing builds for those CPUs in Fedora for a 
long time before that change happened.

There have also been some CPU relevant changes in software graphics 
support used as a fallback in gnome. Not all 686 machines support 
the exact same instruction set and I saw some issues on an AMD CPU 
(an Athlon MP). However, with CPUs that old, the software graphics 
fallback for gnome is not very usable and you'll want to use another 
desktop.

Probably the next change to kernels to look for, would be the end of 
non-PAE kernel builds. I haven't heard any serious discussions about 
doing this, but that will affect some machines. I have a laptop that 
can't run PAE kernels (with a Pentium M CPU).