Re: Release status of i386 for Bullseye and long term support for 3 years?
On 15.12.20 01:55, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Increasingly most of the people who work on Debian don't have i386
> hardware lying around, particularly i386 hardware that requires an i386
> kernel or that exercises the full range of older boot processes. If you
> do, testing and reporting good bugs would probably be helpful.
FWIW, most people probably have amd64 hardware around, and can therefore
use KVM-accelerated i386 emulation using QEMU. That emulation can be
configured with a fine grain, down to CPU models/features.
And until at least a few years ago, that emulation was quite realistic.
For my bachelor's thesis, I looked into portability of binaries, and I
used autopkgtest + QEMU to hunt for bugs where the buildd environment
affected the build (for example, by picking up CPU flags of the buildd
machine).
I found #781998 like that (i386 binary assuming SSE is present), and
confirmed it on real hardware.
So, technically, I think i386 is quite easy to test. To me, even easier
than arm64, where I need to get useful hardware first.
Using QEMU, it's trivial to build packages for i386 on amd64 (using
sbuild, or the qemu-sbuild-tools wrapper I'm dabbling on, which will be
absorbed by sbuild soon), and autopkgtest using QEMU has been trivial
since forever.
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