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Debian Dropping Support For Older CPUs (distrowatch.com)
An anonymous reader shares DistroWatch's report that the Debian distribution will soon be dropping support for older, 32-bit processors.
The Debian project supports a wide range of hardware architectures, including 32-bit x86 CPUs. Changes are happening in Debian's development branches which will make older versions of the 32-bit architecture obsolete. Ben Hutchings provides the details:
"Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle. This means dropping support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors. (Support for 486-class processors was dropped, somewhat accidentally, in Squeeze.) This was implemented in the Linux kernel packages starting with Linux 4.3, which was uploaded to Unstable in December last year. In case you missed that change, GCC for i386 has recently been changed to target 686-class processors and is generating code that will crash on other processors. Any such systems still running Testing or Unstable will need to be switched to run Stable (Jessie)." Hutching's announcement includes a list of processors which will no longer be supported after Debian "Jessie".
The Debian project supports a wide range of hardware architectures, including 32-bit x86 CPUs. Changes are happening in Debian's development branches which will make older versions of the 32-bit architecture obsolete. Ben Hutchings provides the details:
"Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle. This means dropping support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors. (Support for 486-class processors was dropped, somewhat accidentally, in Squeeze.) This was implemented in the Linux kernel packages starting with Linux 4.3, which was uploaded to Unstable in December last year. In case you missed that change, GCC for i386 has recently been changed to target 686-class processors and is generating code that will crash on other processors. Any such systems still running Testing or Unstable will need to be switched to run Stable (Jessie)." Hutching's announcement includes a list of processors which will no longer be supported after Debian "Jessie".
I wanna hear from you, Slack users! Is it a viable alternative on older desktops?
giving up on embedded systems.
i can see dropping 386/486 as they where 30 years old but there still is tons and tons of 32 bit devices in the wiled.
xp supports 32 bit so does 7 8 and 10. its way to early to be killing off 32 bit support as low end machines where all 32 bit until just a few years ago so many are still in use.netbooks embedded etc.
xp supports 32 bit so does 7 8 and 10.
So does debian.
its way to early to be killing off 32 bit support
They're not.
as low end machines where all 32 bit until just a few years ago so many are still in use.netbooks embedded etc.
I guess it's a good thing debian isn't killing off 32 bit support isn't it?
Did you try reading the summary? It says right there, minimum 686 class. Not that they're killing 32 bit support.
so yet another click bait headline?
What a shame. One thing that I loved about Debian, is that it supported old hardware, much older than what is required by the popular dumbed-down distros such as Fedora/Ubuntu/etc.
There are many applications, and use-cases, where you do not need a top-of-the-line CPU to get the job done.
This change, along with the systemd change, do not make me happy at all. Debian is going down the drain.
The "modern" linux desktop is becoming a bloated piece of garbage. You should not need >=i686, multiple cores, and gigabytes of RAM, just to have a graphical desktop environment and browse the internet. In fact, unless you are doing photo-editing work, or something similar, you do not need a graphical desktop at all.
Back when I was a young kid, I used a computer with a 486 cpu to browse the internet, and the Netscape browser was around ~10MB or so, if I remember correctly. Now, most websites are impossible to view without a multi-core processor, and browsers such as fiefox take up hundreds of megabytes. This bloat is absolutely disgusting. And the internet is becoming a disgusting commercial cesspool. My /etc/hosts file is about half a megabyte large, just to blacklist all the crap (MVPS Hosts).
In the past month, I booted up an Ubuntu LiveDVD out of curiousity. It took way too long to load. Once it finally loaded, I open up a terminal, and type in ps aux. A huge gigantic list comes up. Pulseaudio, avahi, udisks, consolekit, systemd, gnome-keyring, gvfs, gnome-this, gnome-that, etc, etc, etc.. What the fuck is all this shit? This is just as bad as Windows or MacOS.
Well, at least there is still Slackware...
Hopefully the Devuan folks will retain compatibility with older CPUs.
I miss the good old days...
"Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle. This means dropping support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors.
No they're dropping support for older cpus as the headline says. Those 30 year old cpu designs won't be supported in debian. No where in the headline does it imply debian 9 will be 64-bit only.
it said dropping 32 bit and i686 there not dropping i686.
No?
"Debian Dropping Support For Older CPUs" is exactly what's happening.
Just because you created a criteria for "Older CPUs" in your head that doesn't match reality doesn't mean it's a clickbait headline.
While it's still possible people would want to run Linux on hardware this old, it's unlikely you're going to be happy with the newest kernel/packages on hardware 20 years old. Finding a copy of an old centos (for example) and compiling old versions of programs manually should be acceptable for any hobbyist in this situation.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
and no one is talking about killing 32-bit support. Debian is just killing i586 and older support. So your pentium with MMX will no longer run debian. Not sure anyone was willing to run a 4.x linux kernel on that anyway.
No, just people who can't read properly.
The processors they are dropping support for, according to the mailing list, are approximately from the Windows 95 era of computing.... AMD K6 ( a tad newer ) and Intel Pentium / Pentium W/ MMX. That's Win9.x era hardware that even if you could get XP to boot on, it wouldn't be a fun experience.
Frankly I don't know how anyone is still running a usable system on that ancient of hardware without custom tuning the hell out of their kernel and applications anyway, as those systems had extremely small amounts of RAM.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Debian Dropping Support For Older CPUs
It doesn't say anything about 32 bit or i686 in the headline.
Just says older cpus.
i686 a.k.a. Pentium II is only 19 years old
I guess not, because no one clicked it.
still support the 6502?
yeah, welcome to the new Slashdot. It may be as useful as Fox news. Saying 586 and older CPUs doesn't have the same fear inducing "older, 32-bit CPUs"
It looks like the only processor being lost that is important is the Intel Pentium with MMX. It's difficult to imagine that that processor still has the grunt to run an OS these days.
Not even an MMX, a Pentium 90 from 95ish.
It still runs fine, has 64 megs of RAM, a nice GPU which can handle screens up to 2048x1576 (I think that is the max VGA standard.), has been running 1600x1200 desktop. Mind you a modern linux distro with systemd is worthless on it, so debian is already automatically out. But a gentoo install, any of the 'small linux' projects, or a hand built distro can make it competitive for non-processor intensive commandline work, or svelte single process GUI apps.
I am a little less peeved at debian dropping support for it than GNU dropping the ball with GCC support. There isn't really an alternative to gnu on linux (outside 686+ x86, x86_64, and arm) and thanks to all the douchey changes in C11/C++11 it's basically required to have a modern compiler even for many apps/libraries that predated it. (Good clean code can still compile across all three, but the 'feature crowd' keep breaking shit just to try out new features and force people on the compiler treadmill.)
i686 a.k.a. Pentium II is only 19 years old
If someone can manage to run current debian distributions on a pentium II then that would be news worthy. If you can't even do that it's not worth talking pre-pentium II.
You might be surprised how snappy a P-Pro 200 feels on the desktop with a lightweight setup such as xfce. But thats definitely a situation where its better to recompile. Recent mainstream distros and their derivatives are absolute pigs with little if any regard for efficiency. Modern distros remind me of firing up a full-blown JVM for a simple text editor
C|N>K
ahem, pentium pro, late 1995.
The main difference was that the Pentium II added MMX.
It should rather be downgraded to a second or third tier platform. The pentium is not going anywhere those machines will still be running in 50 years still. So long as you keep replacing the caps the machines that survived are proverbially like tanks in comparison now.
The question is what are you targeting? Only modern whizbang systems? Sounds like Apple.
Even if those old systems didn't have much they got the job done just fine. The chief problem was and always has been lazy developers that don't know anything about efficiency and streamlining. When I was a kid... you had to make due with 256KB of memory... Databases, spreadsheets, BBS servers....
You kids and your holodecks....
I have a couple of custom built routers using Cyrix 586 clones that this will likely affect. Mind you, these are probably reaching EOL anyways, but if I want to keep them going into the future, I'm sure I can throw another distro on there. Crappy little processors, but fine for iptables, QOS and traffic/intrusion monitoring.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why does it have to affect them? Are you installing the latest Debian on them? And if so, WHY? Older versions are perfectly usable (and possibly preferable) for a basic router.
Debian Dropping Support For Older CPUs
It doesn't say anything about 32 bit or i686 in the headline. Just says older cpus.
And in the first line of the story it says "An anonymous reader shares DistroWatch's report that the Debian distribution will soon be dropping support for older, 32-bit processors." Perhaps the comma after "older" should have been left out, so that it was clear that it meant "those 32-bit processors that are older", as in "pre-P6", rather than "those older processors - you know, the 32-bit ones".
You're paying more in electricity than it would cost to replace those machines.
Is there is a person under a rock running ia32 system still? Thousands of developers, using their free time need support them? Dump ia32. Don't even simile as you do it. Just dump it.
as low end machines where all 32 bit until just a few years ago so many are still in use.netbooks embedded etc.
I guess it's a good thing debian isn't killing off 32 bit support isn't it?
Did you try reading the summary? It says right there, minimum 686 class. Not that they're killing 32 bit support.
He did read the summary. The summary states that Debian will be dropping support for "older, 32-bit processors." There should not have been a comma. The comma makes "older" and "32-bit" coordinate adjectives rather than having "older" modify "32-bit." It is written as if the 32-bit processors are the older processors. And while technically both adjectives apply and it is ambiguous, the implication of a normal reading would be that 32-bit processor support was being discontinued.
Unless you read the whole summary and happened to know which of the processor families have a 32-bit architecture. But many people aren't going to bother when the first sentence says they're discontinuing support for "older, 32-bit processors."
So his mistake is perfectly understandable.
Real lawyers write in C++
You're paying more in electricity than it would cost to replace those machines.,
I'm always fascinated when people make these claims because in my experience every "upgrade" uses more power.
My current setup: Two motherboards (I think both VIA but I might be wrong on one of them), ADSL bridge, wireless access point, couple of hard drives plus ancient 1Gb SSD disks which plug into a PATA connector, small switch. The whole lot draws 60W from the mains supply and will run off a single 12V 60W power supply although I run from two as the system is unstable at power on unless you carefully bring it up bit by bit.
One of those machine won't boot with a -686 kernel. It's really hard to find any (fanless) Intel compatible motherboard that draws less power.
If we assume that system is drawing 30W then it's costing me around 50GBP/year. Even if we could get it down to 20W (and I suspect I could if I replaced the spinning disks with SSD) it would only save me around 17GBP/year (which is why I have more pressing demands on my time than rebuilding the FS on SSD until the disks start failing - especially as every month I wait means I can save more on the price of an equivalent sized SSD than on the electricity I'm spending keeping the spinning disks running.
In fact, my primary reason for wanting to upgrade to SSD is because currently my system is almost silent. I'd love it to be completely silent.
I can't see replacing the motherboard can save me more than pennies in electricity. I can buy something enormously more powerful but I cannot find (fanless) motherboards that sip power. I'm experimenting with an Intel Atom fanless board and Xen to see if I can sensibly run everything on a single machine now which might realistically save me 20W but the new setup has got to work for a very long time for the electricity savings to cover the value I place on my time for getting that all setup.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Okay, people, did someone complain when in 1996 Microsoft killed support for the 11-year old 386 in Windows NT 4?
How about the ASRock QC5000-ITX/PH ? 64 bit 1.5Ghz quad with support for as much ram as you can throw at at since iirc the memory controller does support ECC ram if you are so inclined. Can be fitted with multiple SSDs, both via SATA and mPCIE card based, full length PCIe card for expansion with 4x Gbit+ nics or whatever you want to use it for. Unlike the Atom systems, since it's a full 64 bit CPU it'll keep working far into the future.
i ran my crax 333 all the way into the early 2000s when it was to old to run games it saw a second life as a office machine just handling spredsheets etc. any pc will do for that no matter how old.
They're also dropping support for VIA C3 Ezra cores. The newest of these was released in June 2002 and is therefore only almost 14 years old. This is the only one on the list that seems a bit of a shame. These are low-power cores and run at up to about 1GHz, so they're still likely to be in use for devices where performance is not a serious issue.
It looks as if they've already dropped support for some of the older AMD Geode CPUs, which are still on sale in low-end router boards.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, you're reading into this wrong.
"GCC maintainers whine that nobody is using the 486+ features of their compiler, stating that distros are often built with 386 features so that they install on everything"
By moving this up a few notches they get access to stuff like MMX/3DNow in the 586 class, and all the other instructions added after that. At the expense of the distro being able to install on a 386.
Ultimately nobody is trying to install a current OS on a 386 except inside a virtual machine, and the virtual machines all emulate or virtualize the current CPU in the system(all HVM's) or a 486 (eg dosbox) , Yeah, maybe some people have a real desire to run Linux on their power-sucking 386's and 486's but the reality is that these are all edge cases where people are trying to repurpose old hardware and go "look it still works" rather than "I can do something fun with this"
Even the worst performing modern systems are 32-bit Intel or 32-bit ARM systems running linux using CPU's designed in the last 2 years, not 30.
The C3 Ezra (on their list) was introduced in June 2002 (and ran at 1GHz). Definitely not a Windows 95 era machine. It ended up in quite a lot of low-power Mini-ITX systems where, for reasons of form factor and cooling, upgrading the CPU is typically not an option.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You might be surprised how snappy a P-Pro 200 feels on the desktop with a lightweight setup such as xfce. But thats definitely a situation where its better to recompile. Recent mainstream distros and their derivatives are absolute pigs with little if any regard for efficiency. Modern distros remind me of firing up a full-blown JVM for a simple text editor
That may be so, but it's processors a generation older than the P-Pro 200 that they're dropping support for - they're making i686 (including Pentium Pro) the new minimum CPU requirement. The only Intel CPUs being dropped by this update are the original Pentium and Pentium with MMX.
Technically Geode Processors should work, They're not missing anything from the official 686 spec. But certain combinations of build tools rely on the NOPL instruction which they are missing (but isn't part of the actual 686 spec).
And in the first line of the story it says "An anonymous reader shares DistroWatch's report that the Debian distribution will soon be dropping support for older, 32-bit processors."
Which isn't what the distrowatch headline says at all, and further in the summary it clarifies that with:
Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle
as in 686 is the minimum.
jesus christ.. in every single one of your posts on this topic, you have fucked up some version of they're, their, and there.
In fact, you haven't used the proper spelling for the word you have used A SINGLE TIME.
Eh, those still have plenty of juice, especially if you don't bother with graphics. I was running sarge (3.1) on a P150 for a long time. I had to install XFree 3.x since the 4.x series did not support S3 graphics cards. (Blackbox is a cool window manager, by the way!)
It's still under the table. I just haven't bothered booting it up and upgrading it.
How long will those older versions get security updates?
They technically are 686 but I had one in the original FitPC and most distros saw it as a 586 due to the lack of one particular instruction, I forget which one though. It was enough that nearly every current distros at the time would refuse to install. Debian was one of the few that was happy with it, but not anymore.
"Modern distros remind me of firing up a full-blown JVM for a simple text editor"
Come on man. This is slashdot. A car analogy is mandatory here. e.g. Using a Ferrari to take your trash to the landfill.
(BTW, I just upgraded my eight year old Linux system to a more modern system in order to run a "modern" web browser. Aren't all these new features great? Actually, No. Mostly they are at best different ways to do something that worked fine the old way. At worst, they are outright annoying. On top of which I seem to have acquired dozens of new bugs that I'll have to track down and exterminate one by one. What ever happened to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?")
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
64 bits would only be useful for bare-metal images. small-footprint hypervisors are almost universally 32 bits. larger footprint hypervisors can still be 64. but dropping 32 bit support is probably just laziness. probably comes from the desire to mmap everything (without worrying about when to release the mappings) and not have to check all the code for incompatibility of longs and ints (longs are compiled as 64 bits in modern debian). but it's a mistake. there is still plenty of applications which will only work in 32 versions.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
A comma is not going to fix problems caused by people reading a single line and declaring a state of emergency. There's no way the summary could have been misunderstood by someone who actually read the full thing and had a functioning brain.
please turn the lights off when you're done. thanks.
That's probably a fair indicator as to the underlying reason for their failing to understand the summary and to accuse it of being clickbait.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Interesting. Thanks. I will take a look at that.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Why would ANYONE in their right mind even want to use such an old computer in the first place... I get the whole "playing around with it" thing, but it's utterly pointless. Drop all the support for that old junk, they belong in a museum, not in the hands of some guy in his basement having an orgasm over it.
The first i686 processor was the Pentium Pro and was introduced November 1st, 1995.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
Yes. That's why they teach punctuation in primary schools, though many people never manage to learn it. Those people shouldn't become editors.
Unfortuately, no, we did not gain _that_ much. We could not really afford to drop processors that do not support SSE2, which is where there would be *real* gains on performance (i.e. if we could gcc -msse2 for the entire i686 arch and libraries) in the general case as gcc can use that very effectively for memory moves and much faster FP math. It can also use it effectively for auto vectorization, but that requires "-O3 -msse2", and most of Debian is compiled with "-O2" for extremely good reasons.
At the time, I seriously considered strongly pushing to set the bar at the Pentium M, which would give us SSE2. However, preliminary research showed that had we done that, almost everything AMD that doesn't do 64-bit would be unsupported, i.e. the loss of platform coverage would be too great... so I gave up on the idea and did not even propose it.
I have to check if we can "gcc -mMMX" distro-wide, now. However, do remember that MMX mode changes math behavior in a way that might or might not be a bad idea. While SSE2 gives you a lot of trade-off for that price, MMX (and, for that matter, the original SSE and 3DNOW) doesn't really... at least outside of a few specific areas (codecs, etc). Which would be why almost everything that *really* needs MMX, SSE and 3D-NOW does runtime-detection and uses whichever one is available (i.e. media codecs/video players).
Although I wonder if it would be worth it to introduce a pentium-m variant of some key libraries (using the ldso hwcap facility) with SSE2 enabled (and maybe their 3dnow-2 counterparts). Probably not.
Linux was supposed to be CPU agnostic: only a tiny portion of the kernel really cares about the platform. Dropping untested drivers? Sure, I don't care but some hobbyists probably will.
>people are trying to repurpose old hardware and go "look it still works" rather than "I can do something fun with this"
Those are not mutually exclusive things. Some people think that getting ancient hardware into a workable state is a fun thing to do. A friend of mine managed to pick up an original apple II at a pawnshop, he spent weeks on the extremely arduous task of making workable boot disks for that thing on a modern system - and now it sits on his kitchen counter doing nothing but running a clock program.
It's a serious conversation piece, a digital piece of modern art deco and he enjoyed doing it. So maybe the only use an apple II has today is as a glorified wall-clock but there's something special about a working piece of history that important - after all, the apple II was the machine that began the PC revolution.
The 386 is equally important a milestone - that was the CPU that first brought 32-bit support to PC's, that the first Linux kernel was written on, that I played Descent and Doom on as a kid (Doom on a 386 was pushing the very limits of it's abilities but it worked).
And the 486 was the system that made PC's ubiquitous, for nearly 10 years it was intel's flagship product. How many CPU's before or since were market leaders for a full decade ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I wonder if Lunux runs on intels 8080, 8086 processor? What about the Z80, Z80a, or motorolas 68xxx series processors from my old cpu list?
Since Debian is acting like MSoft by dropping support for older cpus on Linux. (Isn't this the reason that Linux is popular since it can run anywhere?)
but in other Slashdot news today, researchers are trying to recreate the Babbage Analytical Engine. Hmmm, will it run Linux and did Debian cancel support for the Babbage computer?
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/05/07/1417204/researchers-are-reconstructing-babbages-analytical-engine
http://www.zdnet.com/article/w...
XP is still i686 only. It needs a pentium 2.
Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle
as in 686 is the minimum.
The bit you quoted is confusing because it is wrong, however, because Debian is wrong when they call it an i386 architecture.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was having a conversation with another IT Manager friend of mine and he expressed that he would "have to test for 64-bit Windows" at his site now.
My jaw hit the floor. I mean, seriously? Granted, we both work in schools so the clients aren't exactly beefy, but the amount of use they get and they hadn't gone past 4Gb (or likely even TO 4Gb properly!) or onto 64-bit operating systems? And at no point had bothered to say "I wonder if these machines I'm intending to use for the next 4 years will actually support 64-bit versions of our software that I will no doubt need to rollout in the future?"
And the guy had some kind of fixation with printer drivers on 64-bit. There I was thinking "Well, if your managed print providers can't handle a '64-bit compatible' printer driver in this day and age, maybe it's time to look for a new one"
I was pushing out 64-bit Windows years ago, and the only "problems" I ever had are that basically you have to push 32-bit Office for best results, but that will change with Office 2016 rollouts no doubt.
On Linux, I don't even look but I'm fairly sure the default is 64-bit for just about anything vaguely recent (Ubuntu LTS from about, what, at least 10.04 or before has had 64-bit?). I know I've had to install the 32-bit libs on Ubuntu more than once over the last five years or so, for certain programs.
I hate to see support for old hardware dropped, as much as anyone. I tinker with old junk, especially the junk that my workplace can't make use of any more. But, come on. 64-bit? You MUST at least have checked compatibility and taken it into account when purchasing by now.
You SHOULD at least have migrated to 64-bit everywhere practical already (yes, I still have 32-bit devices, but they are thin-clients, or used for things like digital signage and thus I just don't care as they aren't critical and are easily replaced if I need to).
And if you've not done this already, this article and maybe the other comments here are the kick in the teeth that you need to do that.
Especially with 32-bit now instruction sets - how the hell have you been virtualising your stuff with only 4Gb RAM? Or are you not even there yet either? And if you ARE stuck with 32-bit on hardware / operating systems that need 64-bit, guess what technology you need to look into? Virtualisation.
Honestly guys, I have about 5% of my client stock that can't do more than 4Gb RAM because of motherboard limitations but even they support 64-bit operating systems and instructions as a matter of course.
For a desktop-focus operating systems, 64-bit should have been the default for, what? Nearly a decade? I'm not sure, it's so long ago that I needed to worry about it.
* AMD K5, K6, K6-2 (aka K6 3D), K6-3
* DM&P/SiS Vortex86, Vortex86SX
* Cyrix III, MediaGX, MediaGXm
* IDT Winchip C6, Winchip 2
* Intel Pentium, Pentium with MMX
* Rise mP6
* VIA C3 'Samuel 2', C3 'Ezra'
Most of these have been dropped for YEARS!! I have Winchip C6 machine and Debian has not supported it for years. Barelyu can get Gentoo to support it. I have compile all code on another machine and upload it, because the GCC REQUIRES a min memory size of 128MB to itself, so once the OS is loaded main memory available is less than 128MB.
Try understanding what you are talking about.
These old computers are still in use. Not in kiddy gaming machines, but real working production systems. Hell Z-80 (1970's) era are still running the phone equipment.
Good designs do not just die off, they are kiiled by children not learning from the past.
Incorrect. There were some fairly rare instances of Intel adding MMX support to 233MHz Pentium 1 machines. I know because my family owned one for years - any relevant CPUIDs marked it as a Pentium, not a Pentium II, yet it did support MMX and ran at 233MHz. Go figure.
CMOV if I recall correctly
That's not what I'm saying.
Yes, Pentium MMX was definitely a thing.
But the Pentium Pro (P6) came out earlier and didn't have those MMX instructions. So the Pentium II was its successor (P6) with MMX support.
timeline:
Pentium (P5) -> Pentium Pro (P6) -> Pentium MMX (P5) -> Pentium II (P6, with MMX)
The meme is now 'if your name isn't prominent enough in the header files, rip out that old, mature and well-tested code and plop in some of yours.'
It's hard to come up with something new, much easier to reimplement something already in place.
I've looked at the wikipedia page for both the Pentium (586) and Pentium pro (686), and I see that the pro made significant changes under the hood, but I don't see differences in terms of the instruction set (although I may not be reading the article close enough). If the instruction set for the 586 and 686 is identical, then why drop 586 but not 686? I realize that the 586 is slower, but that alone doesn't seem like a good reason to drop support. What am I missing?
The processors being dropped are admittedly ancient and are unlikely to see much use. If any other distribution was dropping it, I would not be concerned in the slightest. The reason why I have an inkling of concern is because Debian is the base for many other Linux distributions, and Debian is designed in a way that is easy to adapt for many low end systems.
I'm not going to lose any sleep over this decision. If I ever had the need to use hardware with such an old processor, chances are that it would require older software on top of an older distribution on top of an older kernel anyhow. (And chances are the need to use such an old processor would be to drive hardware that requires Windows or DOS rather than Linux.) Still, it is worth discussion.
The AMD Elan / Geode does have CMOV support. I've got Gentoo running on one with a hacked kernel that id's and treats it as a 686 class CPU instead of 486 and so far no issues. I should collect my changes and see if I can get them mainlined...
It's the historical name debian uses for 32-bit intel cpus. It's not a reference to the generation but rather to the capabilities.
Up to Debian Wheezy at least, I can confirm it still worked fine on PII-450 with between 64MB and 512MB of ram, single processor or SMP, with or without X.
First bringing up money then going "oh and but the software is free" doesn't fly. Also, even if developer time is worth that much, it's just one developer. How many of those old devices are you proposing to replace? Take the total cost for all those replacements and suddenly you can employ several developers full time for years.
Also because, often the devices you are proposing to replace are tied to specific hardware requirements that can be as simple as "hardware serial port"*, but might run into "this hardware card is not available for newer busses and those newer CPUs aren't supported by boards that can deal with the older busses", and so on. That means that merely looking at the CPU doesn't fly either. The cost is again a lot higher.
Of course, a "linux on the desktop" distribution like debian can kid itself that all that doesn't matter, so they'll probably get away with dropping support. I'm with GP that dropping the ball in the compiler and tools is a pretty poor show. And, of course, too much code is too happy on the featuritis and those developers would do better concentrating on more conservative and less brittle code. But then, that's basically always the case as too many developers are invertebrate neophiles and really really hate anything that doesn't come with "new PCB smell". That's... not good for keeping otherwise perfectly functional hardware functional. Just look at all the bloat.
* No, usb dongle often doesn't do, for again a variety of reasons.
yeah, welcome to the new Slashdot. It may be as useful as Fox news. Saying 586 and older CPUs doesn't have the same fear inducing "older, 32-bit CPUs"
Yeah, irony meet thyself. It's ironical when people ridicule statements with their own verbiage that is riddled with grammatical and punctuation mistakes. Above is just one example. Wonders of the Internet.
There's lots of SCADA and embedded stuff out there with Pentium (not even MMX) processors. This is bad news for them. Still, it's not doom and gloom, as some of the stuff I have seen is still running 2.6 kernels and fine with it.
it said dropping 32 bit and i686 there not dropping i686.
Pay attention! Processors, processors, processors!, not 32 bit
FTFA:
[1] The following processors, supported in jessie, are now unspported:
* AMD K5, K6, K6-2 (aka K6 3D), K6-3
* DM&P/SiS Vortex86, Vortex86SX
* Cyrix III, MediaGX, MediaGXm
* IDT Winchip C6, Winchip 2
* Intel Pentium, Pentium with MMX
* Rise mP6
* VIA C3 'Samuel 2', C3 'Ezra'
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When ram is less than 4gb, i use i686. Of course you could also ask: Is there anyone with less than 4gb of ram? And the answer is: yes, and they should stick to i686 simply because 32bit apps consume less ram.
To avoid throwing away old gear, even if linux drops support for the older 32bit cpus, you could always use something like Netbsd, which still officially supports i486. I particularly use OpenBSD with very old machines, simply because you can (net)install it using a single floppy.
A typical Pentium might not have usb, but usually has a floppy drive.
And if you still thinking why?, well there are enthusiasts, and there are people living in poverty or in countries with serious problems.
These computers used to run w9x which has long been abandoned, and yet they can still be useful with a modern *nix like OS. If it works, and getting Raspis is impossible; why not?
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
The computer has one job, and it does it will. You don't need a faster computer if it does what you need fast enough. Especially figuring out how many times a program is just sleeping.
Oddly enough Linux and Debian in particular are not that popular for standard desktop usages. But Linux and Debian tend to find their way into servers and appliances.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Jessie still has full 4 years of support on it, so you have plenty of time to upgrade, assuming these machines survive that long.
Crappy little processors, but fine for iptables, QOS and traffic/intrusion monitoring.
For these uses, I'd recommend any random cheap ARM SoC. These can be bought for 1-2 months worth of electricity bill for that 586, and most of newer ones can do gigabit Ethernet that I don't think you could get for 586.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I can forgive them for ditching support for products that haven't been sold in two decades.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Being a grammar nazi is all well and good, but you fucked up your capitalization and missed a period in your ellipsis. You may want to step outside of your glass house first the next time you decide to start slinging stones.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah, except they aren't killing 32-bit support. They're killing support for ancient 32-bit processors like the Pentium MMX and AMD K-5 series.
Oh, I'm sorry - did you still want to run brand new software on your 10 year old CPU? Neither did anyone else. This is a complete non-event - the modern 32-bit CPUs (Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, Xeon 3-digit, Athlon, Duron, Celeron variants of the previously mentioned Pentium lines, Atom, etc.) will all still work.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I can forgive them for ditching support for products that haven't been sold in two decades.
Can't be too many of those things sitting around, and any that still exist are probably okay running whatever is on them now.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Pentium Pro is 20 years old, and used an insane amount of electricity to do what it does in comparison to what could be had for less than $125 now. Even an Atom-based SBC from today can do what that Pentium Pro 200 could 7 or 8 times faster, and do it using like 20W of power, maximum.
The electricity savings alone would pay for deleting that ancient hardware and replacing it, much less that fantastic increase in processing power for what is literally Intel's current lowest end x86 CPU.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
to Ubu 16.04 on my PDP-11.
I've got a MSI AM1I and an AMD Sempron which, although it apparently has a 25W TDP, is running just fine with a fanless heatsink. (The power supply in that system has a fan, but that's because I threw in one I had lying around, not because I think it needs it.)
I'd be willing to bet that with some underclocking / undervolting it could get under 20W system TDP. For all I know, my build might be under 20W average power as-is.
My goal was a cheap build, not explicitly a low-power one -- the mobo+CPU+RAM+heatsink+case was well under $100 and I reused an old PSU and hard drive -- but I think it could suit your needs as well.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
ASRock Q1900DC-ITX (quad-core Pentium J1900), 8 GB RAM one spinning 2.5" HDD, 6 watts idle, up to 28-30 watts under full load. This is running reliably for almost 2 years by now, so there probably are better successors by now.
True, they were good space heaters. My last Ppro box has dual CPU's on a full-size board with no fans....still sitting there ready to go. Current top-of-the-line CPU's are around the same thermal envelope tho IIRC which is valid because the PPro was the top chip in its day. (actually that is even debateable, IMHO PA-RISC and Alpha blow them all out of the water but those aren't exactly common consumer items)
C|N>K
I like my Atom board, but a used laptop would be more powerful than ancient hardware while using less power. A low-power laptop with the screen off might only use 15W under full load, and about 5W idle. You could also use one of the machines as the WAP.
Did you ask your friend why he decided to spend the weeks necessary type the raw hex for his Apple II bootdisk image manually into the Apple monitor program instead of spending an evening to make a simple transfer cable and downloading it directly to the Apple? LOL. Take heart. You shouldn't feel jealous of the skillz of such people.
Frankly you find better systems in dumpsters than what they are talking about here, I mean they are talking the K6 and the winchip.
So I want to know...is there ANYBODY here that is actually running the latest Debian on a fricking Winchip? Or a Cyrix? C'mon guys lets get real, just because the last version could theoretically run doesn't mean just booting the damned thing wouldn't be like watching paint dry. Seriously guys the fastest chip I could find on that list is the 550Mhz K6-3, the rest are 266Mhz and below...is there anybody who wants to run the latest Debian on something that fricking slow? We're talking 66Mhz-100Mhz bus speeds here, a Raspberry Pi would smoke these things like an i7 and one of those $50 quad ARM Android boxes would be like a top fuel funny car compared to these things.
I'm all for saving older systems from the dump to help the environment but there comes a point where you just need to let it go, and I would say the Winchip and K6-3 are well past that point. You'd be better off replacing it with an ARM chip that would give you much higher IPC at a much much lower draw than any of these old things.
Not just that - if one co-relates the generation of these chips with the amount of RAM that came with them, it is miniscule. At that time, Pentiums or Cyrix or Winchips would come with 16-32MB RAM as a standard, and some hundreds of MEGABYTES of hard disk. It's not like one would find a Cyrix with 1GB of RAM or a Winchip with 4GB of RAM. And also, the types of SIMMs/DIMMs that were used then weren't even SDRAM - they were at best EDO RAM in some cases, but in general, standard first generation DRAM. Even the highest of capacities wouldn't give one more than 64MB, which would be too little for even Windows XP.
Another thing that the Linux vendors could do would be to maintain 2 versions of Linux - a 32 bit OS, which would be maintenance only, and would top off at 2GB while starting anywhere, while the 64 bit OS would start at 4GB and up
get any cheap quad core ARM board and it will draw 10 W , and i'm pretty sure that it's also orders of magnitude more powerful than your current setup.
And yes there are 50$ boards with SATA support (see orange pi for example) for your SSD.
That's probably b'cos CPUs built using those older processes are far more robust and reliable. Let's face it - transistors made with sub-micron processes are far more robust than those in the nanometers, where the number of atoms starts becoming relevant. Insisting that Intel build those old CPUs - albeit at a premium - is a good way of ensuring that military vehicles get hardware that is duly robust, and not subject to the quirkiness that newer CPUs like Atoms or ARMs have
The major addition for ppro was proprietary cpu socket protocol, locking everyone else out, and significant 32-bit performance improvements. At this point, intel was getting everyone on board the 32-bit train. Fun to think about when modern cellphones are 64-bit and many microcontrollers are 32-bit.
All those single board computers (SBC) like what are used in nuke plants might need updates to prevent hacking. I hope this doesn't melt the thing down somehow.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
My Sun Ultra-5 will still be supported right? That's not "old" is it?
... older CPUs be droppink support for you!
It's the historical name debian uses for 32-bit intel cpus. It's not a reference to the generation but rather to the capabilities.
Yes, but like I said, it's wrong, especially since they dropped the actual i386 a long time ago.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Crappy little processors, but fine for iptables, QOS and traffic/intrusion monitoring.
For these uses, I'd recommend any random cheap ARM SoC.
Alas, all the random cheap ARM SoCs have a single ethernet interface. If you want multiple ethernet interfaces and a decent ARM core, you jump right back into PC money. For some of these uses, that's fine. For others, not so fine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now boot up windows 95, fire up IE4 and post a reply to me from that machine. I dare ya.
That might have worked when Slashdot Media was still owned by Dice and redirecting most HTTPS page views to HTTP, as Slashdot still supports basic functionality without JavaScript. But now that Slashdot redirects HTTP to HTTPS, Internet Explorer 4 is unlikely to support the required TLS version and cipher suite.
All I really care about at a fundamental working level is Emacs (I'm a writer and text mode suits me for many things). My seven year old Acer netbook works fine for these simple needs
My needs aren't much higher than yours, other than that I use Xfce. What do you plan to buy once your Acer netbook breaks, now that the product category is largely discontinued?
> These old computers are still in use. Not in kiddy gaming machines, but real working production systems. Hell Z-80 (1970's) era are still running the phone equipment.
That's for sure. But what amazes me is the lack of consideration for the costs incurred in making and using new processors, which include the costs of new manufacturing equipment, lots of research costs and even new training.
But no, they put processors side by side and go calculating monthly savings, as if things would came into existence as we wish them.
Windoze is the only OS that cannot support more than 4 GB RAM for 32-bit. GNU/Linux can and has supported over 4 GB of RAM for 32-bit, for years. That aside, the move toe 64-bit was originally led by Msft because their OS was flawed and could not support over 4 GB RAM as I mentioned. I got the feeling that the GNU/Linux community followed, and to be honest it's a pain to deal with 64-bit systems at times and having to install 32-bit libraries on my systems to support some applications (Wine, for example).
I don't think that this is really a problem. 586 CPU is not common around here for few years already, if not for more, can't say for sure! But Debian team needs to be more PR professional I believe, because many of readers will think that Debian will drop x32 support at all!
AMD's original Geode - GX2 (used in their predecessor to One Laptop Per Child, a.k.a. the Personal Internet Communicator - later sold as the DECTop) doesn't have CMOV. All "Geodes" are not created equal. It would be interesting to see what the TDP and clock rate on these things would be on todays chip technology.