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Ubuntu Might Drop i386 in 18.04

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

Deeo Kain writes:

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) by toddestan on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:24AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Thursday July 07 2016, @03:24AM (#371114)

    I'm sure you'll be able to run Linux on a 32-bit system for many years to come. It's just that some distributions won't support it (Ubuntu isn't the first, Scientific Linux already dropped support with the latest version). If you plan on keeping the install around a while, I might pick a distribution that's unlikely to drop support such as Slackware or Gentoo.