ke 12.8.2026 klo 13.23 Martin-Éric Racine ([email protected]) kirjoitti: > > 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.
PS: I of course meant linux-image-pentium-m, since pentium4 has too large of a pipeline to support Core Solo and Core Duo laptops, but retains most of the bells and whistles of pentium4. Martin-Éric
