Re: i386 in the future
>>>>> On 2023-05-19, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>>>>> Colin Watson wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 09:19:35AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>>>>> LB == Luca Boccassi wrote:
LB> +1 for stopping publishing installers for i386, it has been
LB> mentioned many times but it's always worth repeating: electricity
LB> costs to keep running i386 hardware are already way higher than
LB> what it costs to buy a cheap, low-power replacement like a
LB> raspberry pi, that also provides better performance.
I'm living within some 200 km distance from a major hydroelectric
plant, so I can afford being more concerned about freedom than
electricity costs [*]. I admit I haven't researched this question
properly, but my understanding is that while, say, the AMD SB740
chipset from c. 2008 (that my primary box is built on) is very
well-documented (and well supported by free software), many newer
ones are not nearly as much (regardless of their power efficiency.)
Granted, it's amd64, but it's still a 'retro' machine already.
Specifically, while I have little experience with RPis (and SBCs
in general), http://wiki.debian.org/CheapServerBoxHardware
suggests that RPis aren't all that well supported by Debian main.
CSBH> Unsuitable
CSBH> * RaspberryPi: requires nonfree software to start up
CSBH> * RaspberryPi2: requires nonfree software to start up
CSBH> * RaspberryPi3: requires nonfree software to start up
[*] My electricity bill is under 20 USD / month.
>>> Well, maybe not a strong view, but a sense of vague unease--possibly
>>> an ill-informed one. As someone who has used SIMH for "real"
>>> work, I have to ask how someone would conduct an install to a 32-bit
>>> x86 machine running under emulation, assuming no OS on the simulated
>>> machine.
>> I occasionally use 32-bit x86 even today (mostly for not very good
>> historical reasons, but nevertheless), and I do it by using a 32-bit
>> container on a 64-bit x86 machine instead. It's much faster to run,
>> and it doesn't depend on installer support. There are doubtless
>> edge cases where you need a completely separate kernel, but they
>> aren't really ones I run into.
> ACK. For people needing/testing i386 stuff, even just a simple
> debootstrap and {s,}chroot will cover the vast majority of needs.
> That's how we've been building i386 software already for ages in
> Debian already.
> More complex things can be done if needed: loopback mount an image,
Or: attach a disk, partition it, mkfs and mount as needed...
> debootstrap, install a kernel, etc. I don't see this as something
> we should be spending much effort on in the future.
FWIW, I'm using debootstrap to install Debian on my boxes for
something like a full decade now. Personally, I wouldn't be
inconvenienced in the least were Debian to stop providing D-I
images for i386, or any other architecture for that matter.
But I'd rather appreciate if it'd still be possible to run i386
binaries on Debian, including running a full Debian install
on a i386 (i686) machine, real or emulated.
(For i586 and other older platforms, I've found I could happily
rely on NetBSD instead.)
--
FSF associate member #7257 np. Border Line by Paolo Pavan
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