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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: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 05 2016, @09:54PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday July 05 2016, @09:54PM (#370302) Journal

    Eh, It's not going to be as power friendly as the P4. And a case is like 6 bucks, keyboard and mouse another 10-30 depending on quality or if it's wireless. Monitor? Most everyone has an LCD TV and you can get a low cost 23 inch monitor for $100 or less.

    Honestly, if you were on a shoestring budget, a pi and some cheap second hand components scavenged from work/friends/family would get you online and be a valuable learning tool.

    My beef with the pi is its garbage SoC and lack of decent I/O. It's a junk SoC that I'm surprised they even bothered to add 64bit cores to. No hardware Ethernet MAC? No external bus other than USB, SPI or i2c? Not a good hardware hacker tool. The Beagle Bone Black is a step up but stuck with a crappy Ti SoC and emmc that likes to shit the bed.

    A good hacker board should have one of those FPGA SoC's or an ARM SoC with hardware gigabit, external static memory bus, GPU, and maybe PCIe with an embedded secondary arm core for real-time tasks like the Freescale/NXP i.mx7.

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 06 2016, @12:02AM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday July 06 2016, @12:02AM (#370352) Journal

    Eh, It's not going to be as power friendly as the P4.

    I think you said that backwards.
    I never saw a P4 draw any less than 25 or 30 watts.
    A Pi 3 would be hard pressed to draw over 12.

    What I like about the Pi is the ready availability of several different OS choices, because I have better things to do than write my own os.
    There is very little reason to worry about having no actual Ethernet Mac since the version 3 supports WIFI which is what most people are
    going to use anyway.

    I had keyboards, mice, Monitors laying around. I had it up and running in 30 minutes which included downloading and burning a microsd card.
    I would have spent more time and money re-purposing a beater from my closet shrine to obsolescence.
    I wanted an expendable machine to read email. That it surfs the web well enough is a freebe.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday July 06 2016, @11:54AM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Wednesday July 06 2016, @11:54AM (#370589) Journal

      Oops, you're right.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 06 2016, @01:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 06 2016, @01:31PM (#370624)

      which included downloading and burning a microsd card.

      Where can you download a MicroSD card? The best I could figure out is to buy it online and have it mailed to you.
      Anyway, the downloaded card cannot have been any good if you burned it afterwards. ;-)