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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?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday July 06 2016, @03:42PM
Your post motivated me to check out latest network performance stats. The original pi used about 1% CPU per megabit/sec of network traffic... yeah that means the 10/100 internal ethernet could pretty much DOS the system at the CPU use level just by sending line rate traffic to it.
The newer PI are supposed to be much better. So I could make a firewall out of a pi pretty well.
One big problem is I'm used to Debian or Freebsd levels of security patches and with a pi with its goofy customized OS it'll get powned a lot, which sucks. Maybe I can get freebsd running on a pi or vanilla out of the box Debian. I'd like to move toward a unix implementation like freebsd away from windows/systemd whenever possible of course.
The biggest problem I have is I have a perfectly good, perfectly capable asterisk PBX drawing about 5 watts as a 32 bit 586 soekris box and the cost of it continuing to do so for the second (near) decade is $0. I get plenty of security patches, its a nice PBX. The problem with the "just buy a $5 pi zero" is a pi zero has no ethernet so its of little use to me, I need a $40 pi3 or something similar. Then the second problem is my PBX works fine and was set up a decade ago and is regularly patched to this day. However I'd have to blow a weekend or so to get the PBX set up on the pi. Not a killer problem. But I'll have non-productive time invested to gain, um, what, exactly nothing over the current system? Very annoying.
I also have a 486 soekris box that already can't run some i386 OS. Its a great firewall box other than being unsupported. Draws about 2 to 3 watts.
I also have a secondary old P4 as a basement mythtv setup, pretty sure thats 32 bit. I'd have to power it on to make sure. Again I gain NOTHING by reimplementing it on a pi. The power use is microscopic compared to the TV its plugged into and the overhead lights. It draws 0 watts when off which it is about 99% of the time. I don't care about space. I don't care about heat in a basement lab/workroom. Its near silent so I don't care about noise. The forced upgrade is just a big annoyance that does nothing good for me.
The whole story boils down to "I get to blow $100 and a weekend and ruin the environment by tossing out working gear and buying new with the advantage for me of ... nothing, absolutely nothing at all".
(Score: 2) by julian on Thursday July 07 2016, @01:32AM
tossing out working gear and buying new with the advantage for me of ... nothing, absolutely nothing at all
Well, that depends what you want. I have been using pfSense for a few years now (after a brief period using Smoothwall Linux). I started out with a full-sized Dell Optiplex 330 [dell.com] (Pentium Dual Core 1.6Ghz, 2GB RAM, 2x80GB HDD in RAID1, extra Intel NIC). It worked. It only had to reboot for updates, the longest stretch being about 6 months. It still worked when I replaced it. Dell seriously made those things to last. They could be out in the world secreted away in closets and offices dutifully running network services for decades.
I bought a tiny fanless computer smaller than three standard DVD movie cases that is just as reliable (probably theoretically more reliable since there are no moving parts). It mounts on the wall next to my modem and I bought a nice little table that hides the whole thing.
The advantage? I no longer have that ugly Dell box whirring away in my office and using way more electricity than is necessary for the job :^)