Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future

There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Plans-Cease-i386

[rene]

Guess there will always be the one Linux distribution to rely on: https://cleanlinux.com

[Weasel]

Guess there will always be the one Linux distribution to rely on: https://cleanlinux.com

I actually thought it was a meme, but it looks actually very interesting.

[alpha_one_x86]

next minimal requirement? i686?

[oibaf]

next minimal requirement? i686?

i386 also includes i686, as well as everything else x86 32 bit, up to Intel Core, last 32 bit only CPU.

[nickbailuc]

what about armel, armhf, mipsel
Might as well drop those 32-bit arches too
Yeah there's some old routers and SOC devices that use those, but im sure i386 is still used more
There are (probably millions) of ancient devices running debian from pre-2010 that are more likely 32bit not 64 (ive seen it on subway screens, probably airports)
Those devices are as likely to be connected to the internet as the 32bit arm and mips arches

[botipua22]

Reasonable, though sad. I've a nine year old Asus netbook with Intel Atom that's still kicking along for now. The CPU is 64-bit but the EFI is 32-bit, and I haven't had much luck running any 64-bit distro on it. I converted it to a home server with Debian 32-bit earlier this year. At least Debian 12 is supported till 2026, by which point the little thing will hopefully be dead.

[QwertyChouskie]

Reasonable, though sad. I've a nine year old Asus netbook with Intel Atom that's still kicking along for now. The CPU is 64-bit but the EFI is 32-bit, and I haven't had much luck running any 64-bit distro on it. I converted it to a home server with Debian 32-bit earlier this year. At least Debian 12 is supported till 2026, by which point the little thing will hopefully be dead.

Early Intel Macs were like this as well, there is some way to bootstrap 64-bit Linux on 32-bit EFI but I don't know the details off the top of my head.

[lorn10]

botipua22

The booting of the Linux kernel & systemd on EFI mixed mode systems (32-bit EFI with 64-bit CPU) was significantly improved in 2022. This is true at least for "common" UEFI based systems excluding Apple's "Wild-West" EFI variant. I think it can be regarded as stable. More information can be found in the following systemd feature request here: Support boot in EFI mixed mode

[hansdegoede]

Reasonable, though sad. I've a nine year old Asus netbook with Intel Atom that's still kicking along for now. The CPU is 64-bit but the EFI is 32-bit, and I haven't had much luck running any 64-bit distro on it. I converted it to a home server with Debian 32-bit earlier this year. At least Debian 12 is supported till 2026, by which point the little thing will hopefully be dead.

Fedora supports 64 bit x86_64 CPUs with a 32 bit UEFI out of the box. Try downloading the Fedora Workstation 39 livecd, then dd the .iso file directly to a USB stick to create a bootable liveUSB and then try booting from the USB stick.