Alexandre Detiste dijo [Wed, May 31, 2023 at 01:00:42PM +0200]: > Le mer. 31 mai 2023 à 12:44, Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> a écrit : > > 20+ year old machines are typically more power hungry, more expensive, > > less performant, and less reliable than an up-to-date raspberry pi. > > Embedded systems and medical one can be crazily expensive to maintain > and even more to replace but some will run on i386 for a long time more > (had to manage some still running on DOS recently ...), > there's also much of amd64 HW running on i386 because of lazyness/cost > for hybrid fleets; energy efficiency is there the least of concerns.
You point out a valid and important use case. However... how should I name this for the sake of the argument... "Large embedded" systems (i.e. systems that act as embedded because they are the general-purpose computer that lives inside a very purpose-specific bit of equipement) are very unlikely to be a compelling use case to keep producing i386 install media. Medical equipment is usually tied to a very old computer because it sports an ancient installation and set of binaries. Those systems are (thankfully!) most often not internet-connected, so as long as you can deal with DOS or Win9x quirks, and the gaping security holes won't be of great importance. Oh, did your medical imaging system ship with Debian 3.1 Sarge? Sweet! Beautiful! However, it's quite unlikely you will want to upgrade it to current-day Debian. Not only you will have to get enough memory for the very hungry 6.x Linux kernel (I once built a boot floppy disk to use a given system as an X terminal, and it all fit in 2MB RAM... Nowadays that would be plainly impossible), but quite likely, the specialized drivers for the vey one-of-a-kind imaging device would not work. And if you manage to replace the old install for said i386 system with a recent one, I'm sure you would be able to replace the i386 system with an ARM-based or AMD64-based system as well -- After all, the old computer is not only needlessly power-hungry, but much more likely to break.
