On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 7:51 AM Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Wed, 2022-06-22 at 10:05 +0200, Graham Inggs wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > As part of the interim architecture qualification for bookworm, we
> > request that DSA, the security team, Wanna build, and the toolchain
> > maintainers review and update their list of known concerns for bookworm
> > release architectures.
> >
> > If the issues and concerns from you or your team are not up to date,
> > then please follow up to this email (keeping debian-release@l.d.o in CC
> > to ensure we are notified).
> >
> > In particular, we would like to hear any new concerns for riscv64
> > (see below).
> >
> > Whilst porters remain ultimately responsible for ensuring the
> > architectures are ready for release, we do expect that you / your team
> > are willing to assist with clarifications of the concerns and to apply
> > patches/changes in a timely manner to resolve the concerns.
> [...]
>
> For i386, I have some concerns about upstream support of the Linux
> kernel. CPU security mitigations for x86 are concentrated on amd64,
> with i386 being left behind. Mitigation of Meltdown required a
> different implementation for i386 that was completed months after the
> public disclosure and was never backported to stable branches. More
> recently it became clear that mitigation of RETbleed was never tested
> on i386, since it didn't even compile there.
>
> More generally, on 32-bit systems Linux can only directly access about
> 1 GiB of RAM, and support for large amounts of additional RAM (highmem)
> has been steadily regressing. This is not likely to be fixed.
>
> This is not to say that i386, or 32-bit architectures, should be
> dropped as a whole. We've supported installing a 64-bit kernel on i386
> since etch, though it now requires adding amd64 as a foreign
> architecture. I do think that at some time soon we should stop
> releasing kernel binaries or an installer for i386.
>
i386 is anchient in tech terms it was introduced in 1985. If debian wants
to keep supporting 32 bit OS then it should bump up to i686. i686 supports
Pentium 4 and later processors. I do not imagine anyone using a CPU older
than Pentium 4 and if they are it is time to upgrade. An Intel core 2 duo
CPU is dirt cheap and supports 4GB of RAM.
> (If we don't make that change for bookworm, then we should probably
> strongly encourage users to use 64-bit kernels on 64-bit capable
> hardware, and document how to install a foreign kernel package.)
>
> Ben.
>
>
> --
> Ben Hutchings
> Unix is many things to many people,
> but it's never been everything to anybody.
>
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