Re: Release status of i386 for Bullseye and long term support for 3 years?
On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 08:27:16PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Stephan wrote:
> >Am Sa, Dez 12, 2020 at 18:09:02 +0200 schrieb Adrian Bunk:
> >>4. People who wrongly installed i386 on amd64-capable hardware.
> >
> >Well, some releases ago befor multi-arch I used to install i386 even on
> >am64-capable hardware if ram was quite low (=< 8GB) and if the chance
> >wasn’t that low that you needed to install ia32-codec to watch ancient
> >video formats.
> >
> >I wouldn’t do it anymore but at least one system is still in use, and
> >there isn’t a real supported way to upgrade from i386 to amd64.
>
> It's still quite new, but we have a package in the archive for this now:
>
> https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debian-crossgrader
>
> It's targeted at systems exactly like yours, tbh. Maybe give it a try?
I took at look at debian-crossgrader, and while it looks like what I
need --- I have a production server running on an Linode VM that was
originally installed with Debian 6.0 ("squeeze") and upgraded over the
years to Debian 10.0. It's probably no surprise that it's still
running with i386 binaries, although I am using the Linode-supplied
64-bit kernel.
However, debian-crossgrader is only available on Debian testing, which
means it's not available on Buster. (And while we could try to
backport it, it's unclear to me whether or not it would be reliable on
Buster packages.) Furthermore, I'm hesitant to update a production
server to Debian testing, since it doesn't get security updates. And
so if Debian 11.0 drops i386, it's not clear that i386 production
systems will have a clean upgrade path to Debian 11 and upgrading to
amd64 simultaneously.
So in the ideal world we would keep i386 support for at least one more
release, or the upgrade procedures would have a documented, tested
patch to take i386 Buster systems to amd64 Bullseye.
I'm probably going to be able to make it work, and I might just bite
the bullet and figure out a way to update to Debian testing with i386
during the freeze, and then using Crossgrader, and then updating to
Debian stable. Or I might just try the manual process at
https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading with lots of backups, and
testing, and crossed fingers while on Buster, so the upgrade path might be:
Buster i386 --> Manual Crossgrade --> Buster amd_64 --> Bullseye amd_64
But there may be less experienced sysadmins that might find this to be
a rather scary process.
Cheers,
- Ted
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