Package: release-notes Severity: normal Tags: patch User: [email protected] Usertags: i386
>From Debian trixie onward, i386 is no longer a fully-supported architecture with an installer and a kernel: as announced in <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/12/msg00003.html> it is only supported as a multiarch foreign architecture on a system whose primary architecture is amd64, or as a chroot or container on a system that can run i386 binaries (in practice amd64). This makes it unlike the other supported architectures (amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, s390x) which can all be installed in the usual way; so it seems misleading to list it as an equally-supported architecture alongside them. I think the clearest way to present this would be to remove i386 from the list, and have an extra paragraph immediately after that list briefly describing its limited support. Straw-man wording attached (which I'm sure can be improved). There's already a longer description of precisely what this means in §5.1.1, <https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/release-notes/issues.en.html#reduced-support-for-i386> (which perhaps deserves a cross-reference but I couldn't think of a good and concise way to phrase it). Thanks, smcv
>From 86765a65069d82d566071e3a2fceb477a9bbe2b7 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Simon McVittie <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2025 10:37:44 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] whats-new: Mention i386 outside the list of supported architectures >From Debian trixie onward, i386 is no longer a fully-supported architecture with an installer and a kernel: as announced in <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/12/msg00003.html> it is only supported as a multiarch foreign architecture on a system whose primary architecture is amd64, or as a chroot or container on a system that can run i386 binaries (in practice amd64). Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <[email protected]> --- source/whats-new.rst | 5 ++++- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/source/whats-new.rst b/source/whats-new.rst index bfa65e83..7e650725 100644 --- a/source/whats-new.rst +++ b/source/whats-new.rst @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ Supported architectures The following are the officially supported architectures for Debian |RELEASE|: -- 32-bit PC (``i386``) and 64-bit PC (``amd64``) +- 64-bit PC (``amd64``) - 64-bit ARM (``arm64``) @@ -28,6 +28,9 @@ The following are the officially supported architectures for Debian - IBM System z (``s390x``) +Additionally, support for the architecture targeting 32-bit PC (``i386``) +can be added to 64-bit PCs for compatibility with legacy 32-bit binaries. + You can read more about port status, and port-specific information for your architecture at the `Debian port web pages <https://www.debian.org/ports/>`__. -- 2.50.0
