Andreas Barth wrote: > Specific issues: > - for i386, there is still sold new hardware with 32bit-only. Are > there open issues for i386 (apart from the 32bit-generic ones)? > Discussion that we need to get rid of it one day should be started.
Brand-new 32-bit-only x86 hardware is currently being sold, and will continue to be in the future. In particular, the Quark embedded platform is a 32-bit x86, roughly i586-class, with no 64-bit support, and no MMX or SSE, though it has a few modern instruction set extensions (notably for security). So, i386 needs to stick around for the foreseeable future. That said, I see no particular issue with moving all the i386 buildd systems to cross-compile from x86-64, to give the linker more address space to work with. LTO will become increasingly important, since new 32-bit systems will want small, optimized binaries, and building a large project with LTO requires a huge amount of memory. - Josh Triplett