Hi Ben
On 2023/06/11 07:48, Ben Westover wrote:
I noticed that there is no i386 live image for Debian 12 bookworm,
only amd64. Looking back to the bookworm DI RCs, it looks like i386 is
missing from those too, so this seems to be intentional.
I have two questions:
1. Were i386 live images phased out? When, and why?
It's been considered for a few releases, we even decided at DebConf in
Brazil in 2019 to phase it out by bullseye (but in the end, it didn't
hurt much to include it for 'just one more release' and it managed to
get enough test coverage without too many major problems).
What we call i386 in Debian was actually i586 before, and has now been
bumped to i686 with bookworm. It's become an increasingly specialised
use case using i386 on real hardware, and supporting some major packages
(especially web browsers) for it is becoming increasingly difficult.
There's also a discussion on debian-devel right now about 32 bit time
and how to deal with the 2K38 bug in Debian, and it's another one of
many reasons why there likely won't be d-i CDs anymore soon either.
In the meantime, if someone does have an i386 Desktop or laptop, they
can still install using the Debian netinst or CD based installers.
Hopefully over the next release, we'll be adding support for
architectures that are now becomming (and hopefully will become) more
popular than i386 like arm64 and riscv64.
2. If so, why is i386 still listed at [1]? Currently the link is a 404.
That's since been fixed, it is no longer linked there.
-Jonathan