Re: On demoting i586 to "legacy" status

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hi,

> On 6 Aug 2020, at 15:55, Tapani Tarvainen <ipfire(a)tapanitarvainen.fi> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Yes, but they are bad at upstreaming their fixes. They have their own LTS fork of every package and those that are widely used get some love, but others don’t.

They support plenty of architectures and many of them are too broken to be used in production for general-purpose workloads.

>> 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%.

Hopefully not :)

> 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.

We won’t.

Best,
-Michael

> 
> -- 
> Tapani