Re: Release status of i386 for Bullseye and long term support for 3 years?
Being philosophically opposed to throwing a good machine into a
landfill, I tend to hang on to equipment for a long time. My
play/experimentation and last-ditch backup box is a 10 year old laptop.
During COVID I spent a little time updating and upgrading it and came up
with this: https://go.carlisle.pk/5boot
Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
Address sizes: 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
CPU(s): 1
On-line CPU(s) list: 0
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 1
Socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
CPU family: 15
Model: 124
Model name: AMD Athlon(tm) Processor TF-36
Stepping: 2
CPU MHz: 1600.000
CPU max MHz: 2000.0000
CPU min MHz: 800.0000
BogoMIPS: 3192.06
Virtualization: AMD-V
L1d cache: 64K
L1i cache: 64K
L2 cache: 256K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0
Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr
pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext
fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl cpuid extd_apicid pni
cx16 lahf_lm svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch vmmcall lbrv
The hardware is 64 bit, but as I still have some truecrypt volumes in
use, and the truecrypt installer is 32 bit, I run elements of each (this
is on both Debian and an Ubuntu tower).
I can run everything from G-Suite to Netflix -- maybe what will
eventually kill it is requirements of cloud services.
I would also argue that the ability to support equipment even once
Microsoft decides to no longer support it has long been one of the
arguments given out in favor of Linux over Windows.
On 12/13/20 2:14 AM, Calum McConnell wrote:
> Hi all,
> As someone who runs amd64/i386 multiarch, this statement from Adrian:
>
>
>> i386 hardware is so numerous and widely spread, that every tiny fraction
>> of i386 users might be more users than half of our release architectures
>> combined. It is not even clear whether this is just an exaggeration or
>> might be literally true:
>
> intrested me. I wondered just how many there were. Popcon lists 17281
> people with i386 installations, but I bet that includes those who (like
> me) installed multiarch. So I grep'ed through the popcon output a bit,
> looking for kernel packages. I figure that, if you have an i386 kernel
> pacakge, you don't belong in the first group of people.
>
> Obviously you all can easily replicate this, and this only applies to
> users with popularity-contest installed, but here are my results:
>
> For a baseline, there are 181,863 amd64 users who are regularally sending
> popcon reports. Of those, 171,916 have the linux-image-amd64 package
> installed. I assume the remaining 5.4 percent are selecting what kernel
> package they are running manually, or perhaps are in a VM.
>
> The 13th most popular linux-image package is linux-image-686-pae, at
> 12,736 installs. It places ahead of every single 5.x kernel, indicating
> that there are more people running i386 (with some extensions) than there
> are running Testing or Unstable.
>
> Continuing down the list, the standard linux-image-686 package (no PAE)
> has 877 popcon installs. None of the other release archetecures have
> appeared yet: which isn't supprising, since every other popcon archetecure
> has a combined total of 1636 installs, the largest being armhf at 636
> installs. I assume these people are the ones who would lose support:
> while some of them may have PAE capable computers, I don't think it's a
> significant fraction.
>
> Clearly, I have already proved Adrian's point: I can say, with certainty,
> that there are an order of magnitude more people with i386 kernels (and
> thus presumably i386 hardware) than there are for every other non-amd64
> release archetecture combined. Further, there are more people with old
> i386 hardware than there are for any other arch. My point is that we
> would lose less people if we dropped all ARM support than if we dropped
> the oldest supported i386 kernel[1].
>
> But lets keep going! See, we haven't seen any arm kernal images yet, so
> who knows if they even exist? Remember, the ARM archectures are the
> biggest ones after i386.
>
> Next up, we hit linux-image-586, with 403 installs. That means there are
> 403 people who were unable to upgrade to stretch, but are still running
> Debian and popcon. That's presumably the lower limit for the number
> Adrian referenced as people who were upset with the increase in baseline,
> since again, all of those 403 people have used their 586 machine in the
> past month.
>
> Continuing down, we see linux-image-486, 310 installs. That's still more
> installations than arm64's total popcon. It's also been unsupported since
> 2014, but hey.
>
> Then we hit linux-image-marvell, which (as I understand it) is one of the
> arm versions. At 225 installs, its not terribly impressive. Its also the
> first non-amd64/i386 kernel that I hit on this list, and where I stop.
> This is supported as a first-class Debian citizen: and yet, the now
> dropped 486 still has more installations.
>
> Of course, the pace of technology marches on, and the 586 is an ancient
> chip. We were right to end support for it: it's not like any modern
> software would run well on such a processor. But there is still a large
> section of the debian userbase using the older 686 versions. Adrian is
> right to say that ending support for them isn't right.
>
> Wall of text meticulously analyzing the output of two commands aside, this
> was a bit fun to make! Now I'm off to bed in my bed: thanks for reading!
>
> Calum M
>
> [1]: Okay, that's not strictly true: the total number of people reporting
> packages from each of the arm architectures is 1256. However, that
> involves three seperate sub-archetecures, and I am willing to bet there
> are a fair number of multi-arch arm users. But for strict correctness,
> pretend I said "all armhf and arm64 support", since those two total to
> only 10 more than the subset of i386 in question.
>
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