Re: i386 in the future (was Re: 64-bit time_t transition for 32-bit archs: a proposal)
On 21/05/2023 07:00, James Addison wrote:
> On Fri, 19 May 2023 at 22:58, Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org> wrote:
>> One of the problems with popcon is that it draws too much attention to
>> old releases which isn't really interesting when talking about future
>> developments. If one looks at arch usage per release (as reported to
>> popcon) one gets this table:
>>
>> | Architecture | jessie | stretch | buster | bullseye | bookworm/sid |
>> |----------------+--------+---------+--------+----------+--------------|
>> | alpha | 1 | | | | 4 |
>> | amd64 | 9090 | 17156 | 41137 | 108145 | 14800 |
>> | arm64 | | 1 | 93 | 937 | 203 |
>> | armel | 21 | 47 | 67 | 68 | 10 |
>> | armhf | 7 | 18 | 216 | 429 | 49 |
>> | hppa | | | | | 8 |
>> | hurd-i386 | | | | 4 | 6 |
>> | i386 | 1318 | 1231 | 1495 | 3042 | 168 |
>> | ia64 | | | | | 3 |
>> | kfreebsd-amd64 | 2 | | | | |
>> | m68k | | 1 | | | 4 |
>> | mips | 2 | | 6 | | |
>> | mips64el | | | 6 | 4 | |
>> | mipsel | 2 | 1 | 7 | | |
>> | powerpc | 13 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 18 |
>> | ppc64 | | | | 1 | 28 |
>> | ppc64el | | 5 | 16 | | 12 |
>> | riscv64 | | | | | 15 |
>> | s390x | | | | 8 | 3 |
>> | sh4 | | | | | 1 |
>> | sparc64 | | | | | 11 |
>> | x32 | | | | | 2 |
>> |----------------+--------+---------+--------+----------+--------------|
>> | ∑ | 10456 | 18461 | 43044 | 112639 | 15345 |
>> #+TBLFM: @>$2..@>$>=vsum(@I..II)
>>
>> where i386 has dropped from 13% to 7% to 3% to 3% and finally to 1%.
>> Also interesting is that arm64 has taken over i386 on bookwork/sid.
>>
>> We don't know how many people downloaded i386 instead of amd64 as they
>> have an Intel CPU.
>>
>> What is also not clear is the bias of systems having popcon enabled at
>> all (it seems to be mostly desktop systems) and how it looks on the
>> total population.
>
> Thanks, those are better statistics (and good notes about their limitations).
>
> I may be playing devil's advocate, but I do also read from those that
> the i386 install-base, even dwindled as it has to ~1%, remains more
> popular than many other architectures (within whatever dimension of
> users enable popcon) where we do provide install images, and then that
> those users tend to upgrade to the latest i386 release of Debian that
> they can -- and/or that despite the percentage-of-total trend
> reducing, the absolute population of those i386 users is growing (I
> guess the former is the larger contributing factor, but it's hard to
> determine from the numbers only).
The popcon graphs clearly show that the absolute number (not proportion) of
i386 reports flattened off in 2008 at about 65000, when AMD64 became
popular. The number of i386 reports has been falling since 2014, and is now
about 10000, most of which are from old releases (oldstable or older). It
seems likely that the number of i386 reports from stable will be overtaken
by ARM64 during the period of Bookworm.
Roger
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