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"everything" for those values of "everything" that do not include one of the most (if not the most) widely used 32 bit architectures. (snark aside: I understan
by pilif 1y ago
"everything" for those values of "everything" that do not include one of the most (if not the most) widely used 32 bit architectures.
(snark aside: I understand the arguments for and against making the change of i386 and I think they did the right thing. It's just that I take slight issue with the headline)
- pantalaimon 1y agoI doubt that i386 is still widely used. You are more likely to find embedded ARM32 devices running Linux, for x86 this is only the case in the retro computing community.
- Ekaros 1y agoIntel Core 2 starting their 64bit CPUs is 20 years old next year. Athlon 64 is over 20 years old... I wonder truly how many real computers and not just VMs there is left.
- pantalaimon 1y agoThe later Prescott Pentium 4 was already supporting 64 bit, but Pentium M / first generation Atom did not.
- pilif 1y agoI wasn't discounting VMs with my initial statement. I can totally imagine quite a few VMs still being around, either migrated from physical hardware or even set up fresh to conserve resources. Plus, keeping i386 the same also means any still available support for running 32 bit binaries on 64 bit machines. All of these cases (especially the installable 32 bit support) must be as big or bigger than the amount of ARM machines out there.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoOpt in numbers here: https://popcon.debian.org/ https://popcon.debian.org/
- pilif 1y agothat tells me my snark about i386 being the most commonly used 32 bit architecture wasn't too far off reality, doesn't it?
- bobmcnamara 1y agoIndeed - i386 is certainly the most common 32-bit Debian platform. Note also that the numbers are log-scale, so while it looks like Arm64 is a close third over all bitwidths, it isn't.
- School-Cotton 1y agoI'm actually amazed by this, I would have bet a lot on aarch64 being second.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoDebian doesn't support Arm64 Mac...
- School-Cotton 1y agoYou can run whatever distro you want in a VM, though. My daily driver is GuixSD in an aarch64 VM on a Mac. I wouldn’t recommend guixsd if you don’t love tinkering and troubleshooting, but otherwise the setup works fine.
- axus 1y agoIn the Linux binary context, do i386 and i686 mean the same thing? i686 seems relatively modern in comparison, even if it's 32-bit.
- mananaysiempre 1y agoFew places still maintain genuine i386 support—I don’t believe the Linux kernel does, for example. There some important features it lacks, such as CMPXCHG. Nowadays Debian’s i386 is actually i686 (Pentium Pro), but apparently they’ve decided to introduce a new “i686” architecture label to denote a 32-bit x86 ABI with a 64-bit time_t. Also, I’m sorry to have to tell you that the 80386 came out in 1985 (with the Compaq Deskpro 386 releasing in 1986) and the Pentium Pro in 1995. That is, i686 is three times closer to i386 than it is to now.
- jart 1y ago8.8 percent of Firefox users have 32-bit systems. It's probably mostly people with a 32-bit install of Windows 7 rather than people who actually have an old 32-bit Intel chip like Prescott. Intel also sold 32-bit chips like Intel Quark inside Intel Galileo boards up until about 2020. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware People still buy 16-bit i8086 and i80186 microprocessors too. Particularly for applications like defense, aerospace, and other critical systems where they need predictable timing, radiation hardening, and don't have the resources to get new designs verified. https://www.digikey.at/en/products/detail/rochester-electronics-llc/N80186/12122323 https://www.digikey.at/en/products/detail/rochester-electron...
- wongarsu 1y agoOn windows, encountering 32 bit software isn't all that rare. Running on 64 bit hardware on a 64bit OS, but that doesn't change that the 32bit software uses 32bit libraries and 32bit OS interfaces. Linux is a lot more uniform in its software, but when emulating windows software you can't discount i386
- pm215 1y agoIt's actually still pretty heavily used in some niches, which mostly amount to "running legacy binaries on an x86-64 kernel". LWN had an article recently about the Fedora discussion on whether to drop i386 support (they decided to keep it): https://lwn.net/Articles/1026917/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1026917/ One notable use case is Steam and running games under Wine -- there are apparently a lot of 32 bit games, including still some relatively recent releases. Of course if your main use case for the architecture is "run legacy binaries" then an ABI change is probably inducing more pain than it seeks to solve, hence the exception of it from Debian's transition here.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zokier 1y agoi386 is not really properly supported arch for trixie anymore: > From trixie, i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. > Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware. https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.en.html#reduced-support-for-i386 https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....
- pavon 1y agoMost production use of 32-bit x86, like industrial equipment controllers, and embedded boards support i686 these days, which is getting 64-bit time.