On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 11:24:15PM +0200, Diederik de Haas wrote: > On Wed May 31, 2023 at 12:44 PM CEST, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 12:51:06AM +0200, Diederik de Haas wrote: > My point is: what about people who don't have the option to *buy* > anything (new or used), for financial, logistical or other reasons? > > I've been keeping an eye on developments in the upstream linux kernel > and saw there was a 'spring cleaning' (i.e. removal of old HW support). > Reading through the commit messages, I noticed 2 criteria for removal: > - Code has (effectively) been unmaintained for MANY years > - The maintainers have not seen any indication for several years that > ANYONE is actually using that hardware. > > I think those are very reasonable criteria. > In my initial reply I quoted someone who EXPLICITLY said there were > people who actually used those i386 devices. > > On the kernel team I've an actual valid argument why supporting i386 > hardware is *difficult* as they don't have the HW (themselves) to > reproduce an i386-specific issue or to test a potential fix for that. > > In the responses here, I've mostly seen the *assumption* that those old > devices must be power hungry. While I'm quite sure modern hardware is > more power *efficient*, that doesn't mean old hardware is thus power > hungry. > But most of all, I'm flabbergasted/annoyed that someone who made explicit and > clear what they need, namely keeping support for i386, a bunch of people feel > the need to respond like "Well, actually, you need this (other thing)". > I find that extremely condescending. > > Maybe it's an option to answer the ACTUAL question? > (and that answer could be 'no') > > > I don't think "but old hardware is still used" is a very good argument > > for keeping i386 around. > > I think that's actually an excellent reason. > > I've likely missed prior discussions around this subject, but I haven't > seen and can't think of the reasons why so many people seem so adament > to get rid of i386 ASAP.
I think I raised this some months ago and was told that it was too late to make a decision to stop for bookworm but that this was something that should be decided early in a release cycle and not at the end when deciding which architectures wouldn't actually make the cut for release. It is already hard to test i386 on i686 hardware: as others have said, most of the tests would be on >> 10 year old hardware. It does become a law of diminishing returns: if i386 programs had to be pulled for security or unmaintainability reasons in the course of bookworm, nobody would be surprised. > > Assuming there are indeed valid reasons to get rid of i386, I think it > would be a far better plan to announce that **Trixie** will be the last > release that will support i386. No: announce it at the start of bookworm release and have the Trixie release team immediately drop it for Trixie - that way you have five years of support to transition off it. Otherwise, you've just added _another_ five years of lessening support to an architecture that won't have been produced for >15 years. > That way people who care about i386 have a full development cycle to > make i386 the best it can be for as long as they can still use that HW. > Maybe they can also make arrangements with CIP to designate the Trixie > kernel as a Super Long Term Support kernel release. > > But tackling on the release notes at the very last moment that Bookworm > will be the last supported release, seems not so 'nice' IMO. > As someone who owned and happily used an Asus eePC several years ago: very nice, silent - it also had a flash disk from the earliest days of flash disks. If the person who has them still has them all running in another five years, he will have got an excpetional lifespan out of them. There comes a time when ports and architectures have to die through lack of hardware or maintenance: we've seen that for alpha, varieties of mips and sparc, effectively, and the maintainers behind the Debian bsd ports have just suggested that it should end. The same arguments that I would now apply to the i386 port I'd also apply to early AMD64 hardware - whoever had my first machine with it, it should now be long gone as power inefficient beyond words and 15 years old. > Cheers, > Diederik With best wishes, as ever, Andy Cater
