Greetings, One issue that keeps on bothering me since Trixie is that we ship i386 without any kernel whatsoever. Yes, I agree, 32-bit architectures are largely deprecated, and most of us have moved on to 64-bit architectures, but shipping i386 as a demi-architecture simply doesn't make sense.
For a long time, the key objection to keeping i386 supported was the plethora of non-PAE hardware that kept the port's baseline to something lacking modern CPU features. I fully agree. More recently, Go and Rust developers added "something SSE2 or newer" to their baseline. Bumping i386's baseline to Pentium 4 would fix this, since its CPU features are fairly close to x86-64 and were also ported to the Core Solo and Core Duo architectures that were fairly popular on laptops. For obvious reasons, upgrading i386 to Forky would still be discouraged, and no installer would be offered, but introducing a linux-image-pentium4 would at least allow some of the hardware to remain usable. Anyhow, bumping the baseline to pentium4 would decisively discard most, if not all, of the hardware that Debian considered a hindrance to keeping i386 supported, and it would come with some performance and security benefits. If Debian will not at least do this much, then let's please do everyone a favor and move i386 to debian-ports completely, instead of keeping the architecture in the current half-assed limbo. Thanks! Martin-Éric
