From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>
To: development@lists.ipfire.org
Subject: Re: On demoting i586 to "legacy" status
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2020 16:50:57 +0100
Message-ID: <2F647F3B-B76B-4D8D-AB31-38A3D66BC6A9@ipfire.org>
In-Reply-To: <20200806145538.GD13914@tarvainen.info>
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Hi,

> On 6 Aug 2020, at 15:55, Tapani Tarvainen <ipfire(a)tapanitarvainen.fi> wro=
te:
>=20
> On Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 03:26:34PM +0100, Michael Tremer (michael.tremer(a)=
ipfire.org) wrote:
>=20
>> 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.
>=20
> CentOS actually still does:
>=20
> https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/i386
>=20
> And Debian and Slackware do (although Debian now requires i686,
> but even I don't have any pre-PAE i586 things left).
>=20
> Of course they're not commercial distributions, but reasonably big and
> well-maintained nonetheless.
>=20
>> Hence we have to fix all the bugs on our own which we simply can=E2=80=99t=
 do.
>=20
> In my experience Debian is pretty good at that.

Yes, but they are bad at upstreaming their fixes. They have their own LTS for=
k of every package and those that are widely used get some love, but others d=
on=E2=80=99t.

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

>> We knew that this has been coming for a while now. See here:
>>=20
>>  https://blog.ipfire.org/post/32-bit-is-dead-long-live-32-bit
>>=20
>> 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.
>=20
> 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=E2=80=99t.

Best,
-Michael

>=20
> --=20
> Tapani


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