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Debian Trixie raises x86 minimum requirements to i686.
Debian Trixie raises x86 minimum requirements to i686.
15 comments
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Understandable, but still kind of sad to see support for 32-bit dying. Mostly because it makes me feel old. :P
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i686 is a 32-bit architecture introduced in 1995. 32-bit is still supported.
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Yes, but the architectures they are dropping are older 32-bit ones. That's why I said support is "dying", not "dead".
The changelog itself notes that this is about 32-bit support:
Debian's support for 32-bit PC (known as the Debian architecture i386) now no longer covers any i586 processor.
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At this point systems that need it are probably a couple decades old at least.
But I’m sure there are people out there who are using some ancient system/program because it does what they need and don’t want to buy a new license or pay for a subscription. Guess they’ll just have to stick with the older versions and keep their systems offline to avoid security issues. Or just emulate an older system when they need it.
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Lots of expensive industrial equipment runs these kinds of processors still. You can still buy motherboards with 8 bit ISA slots even, although you'll pay quite a premium.
But all of that kind of gear typically runs its own distro with an in-house build system. For example, my work uses a flavour of Buildroot for their embedded Linux systems and you can just set whatever processor type you like all the way back to plain old i386 when you build it.
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Whilst other distros move to a Weston (corrections please?) era Intel x86 2013 ish?
Bravo, I think. That's going to be tough.
On a related track, is there any talk of 128 bit chips in general?
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I think CHERI is the only real attempt at a 128 bit system, but it uses the upper 64 bits for metadata, so the address space is still 64 bits.
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Thank-you a lot for that. I wander around the tech blogs like lobsters etc, Reddit and here but never see anything that i remember seeing (if you follow me), but I don't consciously look.
Encryption lengths are getting long so you'd think it was high time.
Your description sounds like the advent of 32 bits where there was a 16 bit address bus stage.
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15 comments