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Re: i386 bookworm image



Hi Jonathan;

About the reasons for an x86 32-bit live image (i686):

Debian publishes installer images for this architecture, and one important use case of Live media is: To check the feasibility of an installation in that computer before formatting it (or upgrading to next OS version).

When Debian stops supporting an architecture, then there will not be need for this use case.


El 11/6/23 a les 17:16, Jonathan Carter ha escrit:
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


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