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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 05 2016, @07:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the end-of-the-road? dept.

Ubuntu seems to be poising itself to letting 32-bitters alone in the dark:https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html

in 2018, the question will come if we can effectively provide security support on i386.

cross-grading between i386->amd64 is not something we can reliably ship. We must continue [to] provide the i386 port, to support multiarch and 3rd party legacy application that are only available as i386 binaries.

Building i386 images is not "for free", it comes at the cost of utilizing our build farm, QA and validation time. Whilst we have scalable build-farms, i386 still requires all packages, autopackage tests, and ISOs to be revalidated across our infrastructure. As well as take up mirror space & bandwidth.

Thus the question is what can we and what should we do to limit i386 installations before they become unsupportable?

In essence this would mean April 2021 as the sunset for i386 as the host/base OS architecture. And April 2023 to run legacy i386applications with security support.

I do use, from time to time, a (then, in 2009) top-of-the-notch 3.4GHz P-IV, for the little gaming I do and for printing. But I did notice even it is easily overwhelmed by many javascript-laden sites. How many soylentils are going to fight tooth and nails to keep their 32 pc's up and running beyond 2018, are 32 bit platforms of any relevance today aside as for IoT or CNC processes?


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 05 2016, @08:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 05 2016, @08:17PM (#370232)

    A leader in supplying the Military Industrial Complex, and in designing hardware that makes system infiltration and data exfiltration easy if you're a nation state actor with their design documents.

    All the crap people are worrying about with the Intel ME and AMD equivalent is far more pervasive in Broadcom's hardware, especially the RPis (where the VC4 is the bootup processor and management engine. But everybody glosses over this.)

    Now MAYBE it will turn out that the firmware isn't nefarious, or the open source implementation will get good enough to initialize the VC4 for graphical use. But then again, do you really want to trade one electronic oppressor for another (Obviously you in particular do. But how about the rest of you?)

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