Why is the base architecture i586?

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 09/28/2009 03:21 PM, William M. Quarles wrote:
> For years the Fedora developers have said that changing the base
> architecture for all of the packages from i386 to i586 would actually
> make the code less efficient for i686 processors due to the large bumber
> of bug workarounds in i586 code for many i586 processors. So does
> anybody know why this change was done?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/<releasenumber>/FeatureList

You can usually look up the feature list for more details

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ArchitectureSupport

Much of the older hardware has become obsolete and unsupported
essentially in Fedora systems. Also because a lot of software specific
issues have been fixed over time.  Net result is that we get a bit of a
performance increase while not losing much.

This is again changing to i686 for Fedora 12

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F12X86Support

Rahul