Re: Minutes from the "32bit architectures in Debian"-bof
Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-08-26 at 12:08 -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> > Andreas Barth wrote:
> > > Specific issues:
> > > - for i386, there is still sold new hardware with 32bit-only. Are
> > > there open issues for i386 (apart from the 32bit-generic ones)?
> > > Discussion that we need to get rid of it one day should be started.
> >
> > Brand-new 32-bit-only x86 hardware is currently being sold, and will
> > continue to be in the future. In particular, the Quark embedded
> > platform is a 32-bit x86, roughly i586-class, with no 64-bit support,
> > and no MMX or SSE, though it has a few modern instruction set extensions
> > (notably for security). So, i386 needs to stick around for the
> > foreseeable future.
> [...]
>
> The last I heard, all Quark chips have serious bugs that prevent Debian
> i386 from running on them.
News to me; I've successfully booted Debian on the Quark I have. Do you
have any additional information about this?
As far as I know, the primary issue there is that Quark doesn't have
some MSRs that i586/i686 systems have, so code that assumes those on certain
classes and doesn't check for them will break. But as far as I know
those issues have been patched upstream.
- Josh Triplett
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