Hi,
On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 07:04:51PM +0000, Robert J. Sanderson wrote:
> i386 Support: Since Debian 13 has effectively killed i386 support for
> native installs, how am I expected to maintain my production uptime
> without being forced to replace perfectly functional hardware with
> this "amd64" fad?
It's extremely hard for me to take this post seriously, but I will try.
All the Linux distributions, of which Debian was one of the last to do
so, did not drop 32-bit x86 support for a laugh, or as a conspiracy to
push newer hardware, or whatever. They did it because 32-bit x86 is
basically abandoned upstream (kernel and tool chain, like glibc and
gcc). It's not supportable software. Reported bugs don't get fixed. No
developers work on this. There have been security problems and lags in
fixing security issues on 32-bit x86.
Debian's decision to drop this kernel took years and was extensively
discussed. Ultimately they did it because they know bugs won't be
fixed.
To argue that this is perfectly functional is seriously at odds with
reality.
"It's the testing that worries me most. Pretty much no developers run
32-bit any more, and I'd be most worried about the odd interactions
that might be hw-specific. Some crazy EFI mapping setup or the similar
odd case that simply requires a particular configuration or setup.
But I guess those issues will never be found until we just spring this
all on the unsuspecting public." - Linus Torvalds, *2018*
https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1807.1/03578.html
If you look back as far as 2022 there were serious concerns amongst the
Debian Release Team as to i386 suitability to be a release architecture,
citing lack of porters and lack of timely kernel security fixes:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903061638/https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html
The same page is only more green today because i386 has been demoted
to a legacy multiarch effort:
"Considering purpose of port only mild concern"
https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html
What you should have been doing 15 years ago was installing a 64-bit
Linux and running legacy 32-bit apps on it through multiarch, which is
all that is left today in Debian, and that's more than what is in most.
Thanks,
Andy
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