Re: On demoting i586 to "legacy" status

[Tapani Tarvainen <ipfire@tapanitarvainen.fi>]

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On Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 03:26:34PM +0100, Michael Tremer (michael.tremer(a)ipfire.org) wrote:

> As stated before, kernel support for 32 bits is bad. None of the
> big commercial Linux distributions is releasing a 32 bit version any
> more. RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS, Arch do not exist for i686 AFAIK.

CentOS actually still does:

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/i386

And Debian and Slackware do (although Debian now requires i686,
but even I don't have any pre-PAE i586 things left).

Of course they're not commercial distributions, but reasonably big and
well-maintained nonetheless.

> Hence we have to fix all the bugs on our own which we simply can’t do.

In my experience Debian is pretty good at that.

> We knew that this has been coming for a while now. See here:
> 
>   https://blog.ipfire.org/post/32-bit-is-dead-long-live-32-bit
>
> We are trying our best here, but if usage of that architecture
> drops below 5% or so we can rather invest our time into something
> else that benefits more users.

I appreciate that. But if it's now at over 20%, it may take
surprisingly long before it falls belos 5%.

Anyway, I've already been planning to replace those ancient machines,
but I can't see getting it done this year in any event. So I just ask,
please don't rush it any more than you must.

-- 
Tapani