Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

Re: what about RPi?

They're talking about dropping 32-bit x86; the Raspberry Pi is ARM and as such will not be affected by this decision.

Re: what about RPi?

Companies like Red Hat dropping 32 bit support isn't going to make your Raspberry Pi stop working. It will only make it impossible for you to run purchase paid support from Red Hat for it. Someone will probably still compile 32 bit versions of it, just like CentOS recompiles Red Hat. Someone else will probably backport security fixes to the last supported 32 bit version so you can continue to using that.

By the time those sources dry up, you won't be able to buy a Raspberry Pi with a 32 bit CPU.

Re: Netbooks

I have plenty of 32-bit kit too… one laptop here is a P4M 2GHz, so circa 2004, and look after plenty of 32-bit kit for various customers. The latter is going to hurt, as there's some proprietary software we run on there that is only compiled for i386, and we need to link that against things like Python.

Basically it comes down to this: they can no longer justify the expenditure of resources, however, as it is open source, we are free to take over that role.

I've been doing my own builds of Gentoo for years now, the last stage3 tarball I've downloaded recently was using musl instead of glibc; the last glibc-based stage3 I downloaded was downloaded some time around 2010, everything I've used since then has been updated in-house.

Re: Netbooks

"Ubuntu developers are saying that people with old hardware that they do not wish to upgrade or who cannot afford to upgrade are no longer worthy of consideration."

No, they're saying that they no longer want to consider them, in order to devote their limited resources to 'considering' larger user bases. In an ideal world full of rainbows and unicorns OS distributors would be able to make things work perfectly on all hardware ever. In the real world this is not the case, and deciding what hardware to support to what extent is a constant question of making trade-offs, and people getting all irate and stroppy and insisting on taking those decisions excessively personally ('worthy of consideration'? really?) doesn't really help.

There's *always* still some working example of old hardware somewhere. People have working 8088s and Commodore Pets and lord knows what else. That doesn't oblige all OS vendors to keep supporting them. We (I work on Fedora, which stopped considering i686 a release-blocking arch with Fedora 24) have generally decided there's a point at which supporting old hardware is more trouble than it's worth; this is why we no longer actually work on i386s, or i486s, or (for most distros) i586s. That point is coming up fast for i686.

If there's enough demand for it, there'll be niche distros that support these old systems; heck, you could create one. But the mainstream distros, as the name suggests, are there to support *mainstream* hardware. We have to make cost/benefit decisions at some point.

Re: Netbooks

Thin clients too. They last ages (compared to your average PC). I still have a perfectly alive, kicking and usable/useful old HP unit running a 800MHz Crusoe. At the same time we have reached the point where it will not even be supported by GCC in next Debian release.

Re: Netbooks

I've been running 64bit Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire Atom (N450), bought in 2010 for ages - it might be a little quicker with a 32bit version, but it runs.

So not all atoms are incapable.

Re: Netbooks

"Cheap lightweight Netbooks still have a place as computers to take on holidays"

They're also handy to take into libraries and archives if you're a researcher. Then there are the Atom mini-ITX boards that make quite nice quiet MythTV etc. boxes.

However, given that this is open source there'll be people prepared to continue building 32-bit versions.

64-bit Atom

Only two of the Atom branded chips (N270 and N280) are 32-bit (IA32) only.

All other CPUs produced under that moniker are 64-bit (AMD64.)

Re: Netbooks

Well, most netbooks still in use sport 64 bit processors. A lot of Atom processors are 64 bit (including most of those placed in netbooks, especially since 2010).

In my experience, the netbooks that don't have 64 bit processors don't run that well with Ubuntu based distributions anyway (even Lubuntu and Bodhi seem a bit heavy for them). The ones that I have are running Debian. Other 32 bit machines I have access to all run Debian, Slackware, or Salix rather than an Ubuntu variant.

So, is it time for Linux to start phasing out 32 bit x86 processors? No. Is it time for Ubuntu to start phasing them out? Perhaps.

Re: Thinks Bubble

Slackware just released its 14.2 version, Debian also continues to its 32-bit support an example being 8.4 was updated to 8.5 not too long ago. Those are just two examples out of dozens of other distros that are still in for the long haul. Canonical may rule over a large market share of Linux uses but it's in no way representing the entire Linux community. Older 32-bit systems of course continue to be declining in number but there's still a lot of legacy hardware out there.

Re: Thinks Bubble

They stopped supporting the 386 in 2012, when the processor was released in 1985 and Linux in 1991. 2012 was 6 years after Intel actually ceased production.

The first chips to support 64-bit were in 2003 / 2004. Do you really have chips older than a K8 or Pentium 4 running around in active service? That's 13 years. That's not bad at all. You probably can't even buy the early 64-bit capable chips any more, and haven't been able to for years. Certain Atoms etc. were cheap for a reason - like buying Cyrix was, back in the day.

Seriously, all your stuff moved to 64-bit a decade ago. You can't honestly have been using more than 3-something GB in all that time either. That's some serious long-term support, and by the time they are actually removed (look at the timeline!) they'll be so old as to be unobtainable. Which is exactly their argument - how the hell do they test things if they can't build several compile-farm computers of them?

Nobody is stopping you, in several years time, running an old kernel or another distro and carrying on. But even Ubuntu LTS is only 5-or-so years at best, and they're not going to include it in the next one, so you have more than adequate warning.

Replacement machines to usurp any machine of this era are literally junk-heap material now.

Re: Thinks Bubble

I've got plenty of "old" 64-bit kit… SGI Indys were released in 1993, but not being x86, they aren't the context of this article.

Actually, for what it's worth, it's worth having a squiz at /proc/cpuinfo and perhaps checking http://ark.intel.com/ as some older kit will run 64-bit.

The following are some examples that will run 64-bit Linux:

- 64-bit capable Pentium 4 CPUs

- 64-bit capable Atoms

Re: Thinks Bubble

The last vaguely mainstream 32-bit CPU Intel released was in, I believe, 2006. There were 32-bit Atom CPUs up to 2010, by the looks of things, but those were pretty niche-y and you're probably not going to have an awesome experience running a full-fat modern distro on one of those in any case. Almost any 32-bit x86 system you have, in other words, must be at least 6 years old and is far more likely to be over 10 years old. That's really pretty old.

The weird Atom tablets / convertibles from the last few years have 64-bit CPUs but 32-bit firmwares; they don't actually need 32-bit distributions, it's possible for 64-bit distributions to run on them with a bit of nifty bootloader footwork.

Re: think about tablets

4gig tablets will very much gain benefit from 64bits - 32bits can not ever use all of 4gigs of memory.

Try it. Approx 0.5gig will magically vanish when you load a 32bit OS on a computer with 4gigs of ram.

Remember the bits are used for address space, RAM isn't the only thing in the address space.

Your graphics card's ram is automatically subtracted from the 4gig of RAM, plus various IO things take their share as well.

32bit address space doesn't equal 4gig of RAM.