Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
On Tue Oct 28, 2025 at 3:03 PM CET, Marc Haber wrote: > On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 03:00:24PM +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote: >>On Tue Oct 28, 2025 at 10:07 AM CET, Marc Haber wrote: >>> On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:59:11AM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: Planned obsolescence is bad, not good. >>> >>> Still, Debian has to rely on stable support in kernel and toolchain. >>> Once kernel and toolchain stop supporting¹ an architecture there is >>> nothing that Debian could do about that with its limited personpower and >>> resources. >> >>The kernel and/or toolchain dropping support is a valid argument IMO. >>Dropping support because 7/8/10/15 years have passed is not. >>Some 'random' other distro dropping support is (IMO) not a valid >>argument in itself. Maybe their reasons behind dropping it, is. > > The problem is that Bastian has a point here in wanting to announce that > YEARS in advance, but toolchain/kernel usually having a much shorter > horzion. So, when we want to guess what they're going to do we have to > be really careful and err to the conservative side. I think announcing at the beginning of a new release cycle that release X (in this case Forky) will be the last that architecture X will be supported, is great. Then people who are interested/invested in it have ~2 years to prepare for it. When it comes to kernel support, I'm quite sure Arnd Bergmann announces dropping support for (device) X *years* in advance, so that does NOT happen overnight. (With their spring/autumn announcement/summary IIRC) As said before, I think those are substantive arguments. My problem is that I have mostly seen imaginary or theoretical arguments. I would be fine with an argument where I think "that makes sense" (even though I may not be happy about it). Just arbitrary amount of years have passed or "people should not be using that anymore". To which my response is: "Why not? If it still works?" Cheers, Diederik signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
On Tue Oct 28, 2025 at 10:07 AM CET, Marc Haber wrote: > On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:59:11AM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: >> Planned obsolescence is bad, not good. > > Still, Debian has to rely on stable support in kernel and toolchain. > Once kernel and toolchain stop supporting¹ an architecture there is > nothing that Debian could do about that with its limited personpower and > resources. The kernel and/or toolchain dropping support is a valid argument IMO. Dropping support because 7/8/10/15 years have passed is not. Some 'random' other distro dropping support is (IMO) not a valid argument in itself. Maybe their reasons behind dropping it, is. I've also seen the argument that special casing is an effort. While ofc true, a lot if not all of that has already been done. When there's practical, not just some theoretical, evidence that it still involves an undue burden/effort, that's a valid argument. As an example, I have an Asus TF-101 with Tegra2 chip, thus no NEON support, which still works great. AFAIK the (armhf) software has already been adapted/special-cased to deal with HW which does and HW which does not support NEON. Removing that special casing is an extra effort ... for what? To deliberately drop support for HW which does not? Why? If changing the baseline to require NEON (f.e.) would speed up all the software by X%, then I would consider that a valid argument. But I have not seen that. My 0.02 signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 03:00:24PM +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote: On Tue Oct 28, 2025 at 10:07 AM CET, Marc Haber wrote: On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:59:11AM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: Planned obsolescence is bad, not good. Still, Debian has to rely on stable support in kernel and toolchain. Once kernel and toolchain stop supporting¹ an architecture there is nothing that Debian could do about that with its limited personpower and resources. The kernel and/or toolchain dropping support is a valid argument IMO. Dropping support because 7/8/10/15 years have passed is not. Some 'random' other distro dropping support is (IMO) not a valid argument in itself. Maybe their reasons behind dropping it, is. The problem is that Bastian has a point here in wanting to announce that YEARS in advance, but toolchain/kernel usually having a much shorter horzion. So, when we want to guess what they're going to do we have to be really careful and err to the conservative side. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Leimen, Germany| lose things."Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421
AW: Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
It's a really good point though about x86-64-v1. There are still thousands of Core2Duo systems out there. Anything pre-Nehalem just isn't x86-64-v2 compliant. These systems basically flooded the used marked and are an entry point to low-cost computing for many. It's hard to justify locking out these users before support is dropped in the mainline Kernel. It's only RHEL that's really pushing for it AFAIK. From their perspective it's reasonable, because of the the marginal performance gains that would benefit their customers. For anyone else it just isn't. Cheers, JD Am Di., Okt. 28, 2025 at 10:32 schrieb John Paul Adrian Glaubitz: On Tue, 2025-10-28 at 09:59 +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: > Le lun. 27 oct. 2025 à 22:58, Milan Kupcevic a écrit : > > It would be more reasonable to count 7 years since mass sales or wide > > availability ends as hardware typically lasts 5 to 7 years in production > > environment. > > Hardware lasts a lot longer. People are forced to update because > vendors have given up on support and are forcing users to upgrade. > It's called planned obsolescence, as I'm sure you all already know. There is no such thing is planned obsolescence. Code has to be maintained and that costs money. You cannot force any vendor to support old hardware forever. You can still pay them to get support for ancient hardware in most cases though. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:35:00AM +, Jan-Daniel Kaplanski wrote: It's a really good point though about x86-64-v1. There are still thousands of Core2Duo systems out there. Anything pre-Nehalem just isn't x86-64-v2 compliant. These systems basically flooded the used marked and are an entry point to low-cost computing for many. It's hard to justify locking out these users before support is dropped in the mainline Kernel. Or before support noticeably declines. I agree with that. But I also see that Bastian might have deliberately worded his message in a way that would prompt some discussion. No bill leaves parliament as it entered parliament. It's only RHEL that's really pushing for it AFAIK. From their perspective it's reasonable, because of the the marginal performance gains that would benefit their customers. For anyone else it just isn't. I agree that Debian should not orient itself along Enterprise Linuxes' commercial decisions. We should orient ourselves along what toolchain and kernels reasonably support, acknowledging that this is hard to determine years in advance. I would be fine with a statement "these and these architectures might lose their support with Debian's 2029 release" IF we can optionally decide to postpone that date for certain architectures if we find, preparing for the 2029 release, that there still is reasonable support. Greetings Marc -- - Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Leimen, Germany| lose things."Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421
Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
On Tue, 2025-10-28 at 09:59 +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: > Le lun. 27 oct. 2025 à 22:58, Milan Kupcevic a écrit : > > It would be more reasonable to count 7 years since mass sales or wide > > availability ends as hardware typically lasts 5 to 7 years in production > > environment. > > Hardware lasts a lot longer. People are forced to update because > vendors have given up on support and are forcing users to upgrade. > It's called planned obsolescence, as I'm sure you all already know. There is no such thing is planned obsolescence. Code has to be maintained and that costs money. You cannot force any vendor to support old hardware forever. You can still pay them to get support for ancient hardware in most cases though. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
On Tue, 2025-10-28 at 10:07 +0100, Marc Haber wrote: > On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:59:11AM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: > > Debian isn't Microsoft. Debian isn't Apple. Debian isn't Google. > > Please don't learn the wrong lessons from them. Planned obsolescence > > is bad, not good. > > Still, Debian has to rely on stable support in kernel and toolchain. > Once kernel and toolchain stop supporting¹ an architecture there is > nothing that Debian could do about that with its limited personpower and > resources. POWER8 is still years away from being removed from the kernel and toolchain. I don't think that anyone at IBM is seriously considering dropping POWER8 support in the kernel or even the toolchain at the moment. I mean, POWER5 was first announced in 2003 and is still supported by the Linux kernel and toolchain, so I'm very sure that POWER8 is not going to go anywhere soon. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `-GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)
On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:59:11AM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: Debian isn't Microsoft. Debian isn't Apple. Debian isn't Google. Please don't learn the wrong lessons from them. Planned obsolescence is bad, not good. Still, Debian has to rely on stable support in kernel and toolchain. Once kernel and toolchain stop supporting¹ an architecture there is nothing that Debian could do about that with its limited personpower and resources. Greetings Marc ¹ there is more than one way to do that, either pull support officially, letting people know about that, or just let the respective code rot away slowly because noone tests any more -- - Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Leimen, Germany| lose things."Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421
