Bug#1033065: release-notes: i386 notes should specify minimum CPU requirements
Package: release-notes
Followup-For: Bug #1033065
X-Debbugs-Cc: pabs@debian.org, ballombe@debian.org
Dear Maintainer and Éric-Martin (with Bill on carbon copy),
Please find linked below a previous release note from Debian 9.0 (stretch)
that we could use to provide relevant user guidance:
https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/i386/release-notes/ch-information.html#i386-is-now-almost-i686
(I discovered this while reading a 2019 mailing list discussion[1])
On Mon, 20 Mar 2023 13:31:37 +0800, pabs wrote:
> Broadly speaking, detecting non-baseline instruction usage isn't
> possible without false positives, because the program could use runtime
> instruction selection based on the current CPU to avoid currently
> unavailable instructions, while the binary would still contain those
> instructions for use on other CPUs.
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/InstructionSelection
>
> Of course you could do the scanning and then use autopkgtests or manual
> tests to find out if the found programs work on the relevant CPUs.
Thank you, that makes sense.
I've run some ad-hoc script analysis[2] on a recent mirror of the bookworm i386
archive, and it appears that ~20% or so of packages are potentially affected in
that (so, in all likelihood, Debian is currently uninstallable and/or unusable
on Geode LX).
In theory I would like to run a comparative analysis against the snapshot
archives from previous points in time, but am not sure whether I'll get around
to doing that.
On Mon, 20 Mar 2023 13:31:37 +0800, pabs wrote:
> Perhaps lintian could add classification tags for the relevant CPU
> instructions and then the i386 port could have extra autopkgtest nodes
> that only process the packages detected by lintian.
That's not a bad idea. Are there any reasons that that might _not_ be a good
idea before filing a wishlist bug? (performance, implications of scanning
binary packages, ...)
[1] - https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/04/msg01091.html
[2] - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1005863#48
Reply to: