Re: About i386 support
On Fri, May 17, 2024 at 09:58:58PM +0200, Victor Gamper wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> Is it correct that debian 13 is planned to be released without
> an i386 iso and i386 is planned to be deprecated?
> If so, I'd like to ask to reconsider this seeing as there is still a
> plethora of i386 machines and i386 is as of now still the
> second most used architecture according to popcon with 8437
> reports there, if I understand correctly.
> I personally use the i386 version on multiple machines,
> including a ThinkPad T60 (on which I'm writing this on) and a
> Transmeta Efficeon, which I'm using as a router and access point.
>
The Transmeta _won't_ do x86_64/amd64 - but is obscure (and rare) hardware
at this point.
The T60 will do amd64.
At this point, any i386-only hardware is well over ten years old.
There's no real UEFI support - so legacy MBR.
Amything else can do amd64. The law of diminishing returns, the lack
of real i386 hardware to test on - at this point, i386 32 bit is effectively
dead. Several large packages can't be built natively on i386 - things like
firefox and libreoffice really need to be built on amd64 hardware for i386.
Pretty much every major Linux distribution is dropping _any_ 32 bit: Debian
is trying to support 32 bit on armhf, for example, which is more than
Ubuntu and Fedora.
In reality, i386 should probably have been dropped early (or at the last
minute) for bookworm; some libraries will be kept for compatibility
but it's not realistic to maintain i386 for the whole of the trixie lifecycle.
> I personally don't understand why you'd want to deprecate i386,
> especially if you compare it to other official architectures
> (s390, ppc64el and armel have way less reports on popcon. I don't
> want to suggest to deprecate any of these architectures, but just
> compare the amount of users there). For many tasks an i386
> machine still offers more than enough capabilities and deprecating
> i386 now would brick many otherwise completely functional machines.
>
See above. Popcon isn't really an absolute measure: not everyone enables
popcon so there may be very many machines running in server farms or
whatever. Very few people have an s390 around: ppc64el similarly and
armel is valid for less and less hardware (modulo the Raspberry Pi Zero)
_Some_ embedded hardware was sold more recently but it wouldn't
necessarily run Debian.
> Just not shipping an i386 iso would still be deprecating an architecture,
> as many people don't have the knowledge and/or patience to set up
> debian over debootstrap which would again practically brick i386 machines
> for many users. Also, deprecating i386 would probably make it
> difficult or downright impossible for downstream distributions to
> themself keep the i386 version maintained,
> as they'd have to invest much more effort to keep i386.
>
If downstream versions _REALLY_ need genuine i386, they also need to
ask Debian and step up to maintain. Any Ubuntu derivatives - so
second order Debian versions - are already out of support on the
latest Ubuntu.
> Is there a reason to do this? If so, what would be required to keep
> the i386 version, seeing as it still is important and used?
>
> regards,
> Maite Gamper (zeldakatze)
>
It would need several maintainers to step up and maintain hardware
and track upstream libraries, compatibility and a recompile farm.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I think that's it in a nutshell.
Andy
(amacater@debian.org)
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