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".

Comments

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian Linux is catching up to Windows XP.

Re:Finally

[luther349]

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.

Re:Finally

[LiENUS]

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.

Re:Finally

[luther349]

so yet another click bait headline?

Re:Finally

[LiENUS]

"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.

Re:Finally

[luther349]

it said dropping 32 bit and i686 there not dropping i686.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[godrik]

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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just people who can't read properly.

Re:Finally

[chmod a x mojo]

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.

Re:Finally

[LiENUS]

Debian Dropping Support For Older CPUs

It doesn't say anything about 32 bit or i686 in the headline.
Just says older cpus.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

i686 a.k.a. Pentium II is only 19 years old

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess not, because no one clicked it.

Re: Finally

[PublicSchill]

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"

Re: Finally

[WarJolt]

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.

Re:Finally

[inode_buddha]

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

Re: Finally

[ChunderDownunder]

ahem, pentium pro, late 1995.

The main difference was that the Pentium II added MMX.

Re:Finally

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Finally

[Dahamma]

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.

Re:Finally

[Guy Harris]

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".

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

You're paying more in electricity than it would cost to replace those machines.

Re: Finally

[locofungus]

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.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[luther349]

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.

Re: Finally

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Finally

[LiENUS]

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).

Re:Finally

[LiENUS]

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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

And if so, WHY? Older versions are perfectly usable (and possibly preferable) for a basic router.

How long will those older versions get security updates?

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[vtcodger]

"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?")

Re:Finally

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Finally

[KGIII]

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.

Re: Finally

[locofungus]

Interesting. Thanks. I will take a look at that.

Re: Finally

[Damouze]

The first i686 processor was the Pentium Pro and was introduced November 1st, 1995.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. That's why they teach punctuation in primary schools, though many people never manage to learn it. Those people shouldn't become editors.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[silentcoder]

>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 ?

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.zdnet.com/article/w...

XP is still i686 only. It needs a pentium 2.

Re:Finally

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Finally

[technosaurus]

CMOV if I recall correctly

Re: Finally

[ChunderDownunder]

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)

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Finally

[Predius]

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...

Re:Finally

[LiENUS]

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.

Re: Finally

[Narcocide]

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.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[Ol Olsoc]

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'

Re:Finally

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Finally

[KiloByte]

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.

Re:Finally

[Junta]

I can forgive them for ditching support for products that haven't been sold in two decades.

Re:Finally

[mrchaotica]

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.

Re:Finally

[MachineShedFred]

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.

Re:Finally

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re:Finally

[MachineShedFred]

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.

Re: Finally

[mrchaotica]

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'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.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[inode_buddha]

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)

Re: Finally

[mattventura]

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.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Finally

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re: Finally

[technosaurus]

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.

So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanna hear from you, Slack users! Is it a viable alternative on older desktops?

Re:So.. Slackware?

[luther349]

or arch they still do 32 bit.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[LiENUS]

or arch they still do 32 bit.

So does testing and unstable debian as long as you have 686 class or better cpu.

Try reading the summary it says right there 32-bit is supported as long as you have a cpu that was made in the past twenty years (The first 686 class cpu was made in 1995)

Re:So.. Slackware?

[tom229]

While I don't know what the slack package maintainers are doing, I'd assume most distributions are going to stop supporting older architectures in their repositories eventually. The solution is to use older versions of packages, compile from source, etc. Even the Linux kernel stopped supporting i386 after something like version 3.7. If you have a processor from 1985, you just have to use an old version of the kernel. Is it going to have security concerns? Probably. But you're not using a 30 year old system in production are you?

Likewise, if you're using hardware from 1995 (what they're talking about here) you're just going to have to use old software to fit it. There's nothing really to see here. No software supports hardware much beyond 10 years.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch limited themselves to 686 or newer some time ago.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[slashdot_commentator]

I mean they are talking the K6 and the winchip.

I'd be shocked to see a K6 era machine in a dumpster (and disgusted it took this long to chuck it).

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.

Word. You may not be able to run Windows 95 on it (although I think there's something that's trying to do that, reactOS, or something like that), but there's probably some Win95 emulator that would run someone's nostalgia software.

I'm still pretty peeved at myself at buying an old Solaris server from circa 1998 in 2006, which I chucked in 2012. Big, noisy, & slow with 2GB of RAM. I still have a soft spot for old Sparc desktop machines, because they're pretty much embedded chips with openboot.

Hopefully one day, OS environments will become so abstracted, that there will never be a need to support old hardware, and old software will always be able to run, emulated or not.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[luther349]

why office machines dont need anything in terms of power. people tend not to replace or throw out unless there broken. gamers are the only reasion thers constent demand for more powerfull boxes and lazy programers. app wise thers nothing a 95/98 era machine cant do compared to a 64 bit machine.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[LiENUS]

Other than the guys doing things like CAD, you know office work... sure.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[serviscope_minor]

I wanna hear from you, Slack users! Is it a viable alternative on older desktops?

Older like, how old? They're dropping Pentium classic support and moving to PPro only. I think the absolute fastest desktop CPU was IIRC the Pentium MMX 233MHz, which wa first sold in some time around 1997.

There have of course been faster variants produced by others like the Vortex86 CPU for embedded stuff, which I think wound up somewhere near 800MHz. Though they were never desktop CPUs, and anyway, if you're doing embedded dev, you couldprobably grab yourself a small cluster of cheap AMD machines, make a build bot and recompile everything.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than the guys doing things like CAD, you know office work... sure.

AutoCAD ran just fine on 32-bit computers with "older CPUs" for many years.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that there are some government computers that still use the 8" floppy disks, right?

When something is purchased by the government (e.g. vehicles, weapons...) a support contract is typically bought too, meaning they can continue to use that something for its entire lifetime. Considering we have missiles pushing 30 years and planes pushing 70, I'd say it's a safe bet that there's some 386 and 486 processors out there. Running Debian? maybe, maybe not.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[EmeraldBot]

Other than the guys doing things like CAD, you know office work... sure.

AutoCAD ran just fine on 32-bit computers with "older CPUs" for many years.

Um, a Pentium MMX? With 64 MB of RAM? The oldest version I can find official info on is AutoCAD 2004, which recommends (at minimum, mind you) 4x the RAM and a Pentium 4. Did you use the same version of AutoCAD for 20+ years, or what? They aren't obsoleting 32 bit processors, they're obsoleting a very small group of processors that can't even handle Windows XP.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not running gnu/debian/gnu/poetterix/gnu on anything, but I do have systems that old... and older. There's not a lot to be found in dumpsters here, it all gets religiously recycled and you're not allowed to take anything when it's in Official Recycling Depots[tm]. So there's probably newer stuff than my main workstation in there, I can't get at it.

More importantly, do the newer systems see any noticeable speed increase because of the dropped support? At all?

I know that in california you get pretty amazing stuff in the dumpster but that's not true elsewhere. And since it's silly valley that drives the scene, well, yeah, ten years is a long time to remember, right? So let's just forget about it, right? Well, no. Many reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is that our (ie humanity's) tech use needs to move away from change for its own sake, just to chase that amazing thrill of the newness, and more toward being genuinely useful. That does mean that operating software has no excuse to drop support for anything: Instead, figure out how to keep the support without penalising support for other stuff, newer or older. That is really the problem.

Oh, and I don't think you sound more sincere when you say you're "all for" something then continue to say things to the effect that really, you're against. I think it sounds dishonest. For penance you can promise (and make good on) a quad core ARM board to anyone who hits you up and shows you a pre-pentium pro system.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch was limited to 686 since it was started. That was one of the big selling points. (built for i686 and not i486)

Re:So.. Slackware?

[LiENUS]

Yes and it works better for doing complex/large designs with more than 4Gb of ram. As does things like photo editing, pagination, hell even doing spreadsheets is improved with more ram. Sure you can do it with 16Mb of ram but you'll swap a whole lot less with 32Gb.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[thegarbz]

But you're not using a 30 year old system in production are you?

I'd wager the only place you'll find a 30 year old system is in production.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Our brand new million dollar vehicles the army gave us about 8 years ago? The computer in them is a 486. It runs on some version of *ix although I am not sure which one.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Narcocide]

Raspberry Pi would smoke these things...

Believe it or not, the presence of a PCI bus on that K6 motherboard is going to give it a conspicuous disk I/O throughput advantage over the Pi that will allow it to pull out ahead in many real-world performance tests where you've come to take for granted having enough bus bandwidth.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't know what the slack package maintainers are doing...

Slacking off, most likely.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch limited themselves to 686 or newer some time ago.

Yeah, the irony too. At one time they were trumpeting themselves as the saviour of old hardware! "go grab that old thing in the attic or basement and make it useful again!"

But they didn't support my AMD K6-II...

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't know what the slack package maintainers are doing

For the record: they're doing fine, within the usual timeframe (aka "when it works"), and without systemd! With slackpkg and slackbuilds recipes - and their frontend sbopkg - I think is a best fit for ancient hardware. As far as I know their main FTP server still was a pentium II few years ago..

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/almost-a-beta/

Re:So.. Slackware?

[KGIII]

That was my first exposure to AMD. I had a K6-II 350 MHz that I'd overclocked so that it was just a wee bit below 500 MHz. It was actually quite a nice little system. I had, IIRC, 512 MB of RAM even. It was pretty speedy for its day.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP will run on a Pentium 233 MMX! :P

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamers are not the only reason there is consistent demand for more powerful boxes.

There is also scientific computing.

And the folks who do photo- and video-editing always want higher resolution, and better quality, which requires more powerful boxes.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[hairyfeet]

With on average 64Mb of super slow SDRAM feeding that data to an on average 4200 RPM or if you were lucky a 5400 RPM HDD with no memory buffer? I find that awful hard to believe, especially since the Pi is using much faster DDR and NAND flash, not to mention the ARM is literally 4 times faster with much more advanced instruction sets compared to a Winchip or a Cyrix.

Re:So.. Slackware?

[armanox]

Depends on what you are looking for, and what you call older. I have Slackware running both my Precision M4500 (i7 860, 8GB RAM, QuadroFX 880m, Dual SSD) and my Thinkpad 600e (Pentium II, 192 MB RAM, Neomagic NM2200, 8GB IDE HDD....) which are both older systems. The Pentium II isn't viable for anything internet related, but still works for somethings (serial terminal in my case). XFCE works on both (so does MaXX)

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Salix 14.1 (a Slackware derivate) works on both my Sempron 2300+ (c. 2004) and on my Geode LX800.

Certain applications give "illegal instruction" (Midori) while others fortunately work well (Firefox, Libreoffice).

The Geode LX800 more or less can deal with use cases suitable for an Android tablet; the Sempron is quite useful for office work or, alternatively, as main machine for a family of limited resources. With an old Nvidia card and Nouveau, it can even be used for typical games (not the ones that require a "gamer" PC).

Re:So.. Slackware?

[Narcocide]

1) the pi has NO NAND flash
2) the much faster DDR will be useless as a performance booster for trying to download or save anything larger than about 500MB to the SDHC card, the fastest of which still crap out well below 10megabits sustained write speeds.
3) despite being USB 2.0 compatible (except for spec power) the bus connection to the USB port isn't any faster than about a USB 1.0 connection, which incidentally is also about the same sub-10mbps speed as your typical SD/SDHC or USB flash cards

summary: don't take my word for it. try it yourself.

Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

giving up on embedded systems.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[luther349]

yea it seems debian and ubuntu just love shooting themselves in the foot.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[godrik]

really? Are there many embedded system processor that run intel's instruction set i586 and older ?

Re: Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect? They should have been renamed Debilian ages ago. It is the shittyest of all linuxes close followed by fedora and RH 7+ yet they still have much better package manager, but are also tainted with systemd. But Debilian have been having moron at the wheel for like 15 years now

Re: Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those republicans just aren't smart enough to understand what an embedded system is.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Khyber]

Intel was still selling embedded 386 and 486 processors until 2007. POS terminals don't require jack shit for power. They're all over the place.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[religionofpeas]

No need to run the latest distributions on a POS terminal. Just get an older one.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[MightyMartian]

And then deal with the fact that the versions are EOL and you're running without patches.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[ChunderDownunder]

Intel currently has the P5-compatible Quark/Curie platform, jumping on the arduino train.

In any case, Debian would be too heavy given the lack of RAM.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[sg_oneill]

What "embedded" systems are still being made with old school pentiums?!

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[slashdot_commentator]

You mean jumping off the arduino train. They just killed that whole line about two weeks ago, in a strategic product lines reorg.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[ChunderDownunder]

They did?

I thought they were just dropping their smartphone Atom SoCs.

The Quark is a completely different chip.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[TheRaven64]

The AMD Geode systems are still on sale in some cheap boards (PC-Engines and Soekris), and they were on the list of processors Debian dropped support for last time. It doesn't look as if this release adds any new processors that are still used in the embedded space to the unsupported list.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[serviscope_minor]

Intel currently has the P5-compatible Quark/Curie platform, jumping on the arduino train.

In any case, Debian would be too heavy given the lack of RAM.

They have an astonishingly huge 1G of RAM. This here laptop has that much RAM.

Honestly, though I don't get the platform and I don't think intel really "get" the low end. I've bumped into some wearable stuff recently and we were talking to Intel, as they are trying to get people to port stuff over to their platform (Curie).

It turns out that the nRF51 series bluetooth chip they have on the module as a bluetooth controller is very substantuially more powerful than the chip we currently use and would more than adequate for any forseeable usecase. The attacked 600MHz pentium with a gig of RAM would be completely utterly redundant.

I'm having a hard job imagining anything which would need quite that much CPU in that formfactor. I can imagine usecases for arbitrarily large amounts of CPU in a larger formfactor, but that particular combination of size/CPU/power draw is a really weird niche.

Then again, the Curie is just a showcase for the quark CPU, which is yet another ARM competitor, but one which has the nice platform bits of x86 (something ARM did fuck up).

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

If your POS terminals are directly connected to the internet, you have bigger problems then lack of patches.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[drinkypoo]

If your POS terminals are directly connected to the internet, you have bigger problems then lack of patches.

If you're assuming that a POS terminal can't be involved in an attack just because it's not directly connected to the internet, then you have bigger problems than hosts directly connected to the internet, and they are between the keyboard and chair.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[drinkypoo]

The AMD Geode systems are still on sale in some cheap boards (PC-Engines and Soekris), and they were on the list of processors Debian dropped support for last time.

But is anyone actually still buying those? Or do they just have some back stock they can't get rid of? Their geode boards have basically no RAM, so these days you can get an ARM board that will crap all over them for a lot less.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[drinkypoo]

What "embedded" systems are still being made with old school pentiums?!

People are still making embedded boards with 486s, let alone 586s. They are small and they are cheap. They tend to have PC104 bus and they tend to be used to replace legacy PC104-based industrial control machines which depend on specific hardware and software to get the job done. In theory you could replace the hardware part with a PCI card but if the software is very bad, and it often is, then the timing of the original hardware may be relevant to its function, and you may actually need to replace like with like when it comes to the CPU.

On the other hand, virtually all of this hardware is running DOS, so it doesn't matter what Debian does.

Re: Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck uses Debian on embedded systems? Seriously, if you're building an embedded distro you probably build everything from source to target the exact architecture. I can see hobbyists who can't be bothered, but if that's the case get an RPi, an iMX6 board, or whatever beagle thing TI is selling these days. Honestly, I haven't touched x86 for embedded in at least 5 years, and today there is ZERO reason to even consider it. Oh, and if you use these old systems in production, you simply pay someone to build and support updates for you - not the end of the world.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[TheRaven64]

The ALIX boards have 256MB, which is ample for something like pfsense (even with its PHP web UI, which burns 20-40MB and was painful on 64MB). A lot of the MIPS routers have 32MB, which is a lot tighter. These also tend to have quite a long life - they're commonly in deployments that go 10 years or so between upgrades.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Thumper_SVX]

If you're running Debian on an embedded system then you're doing it wrong anyway. Debian has never been tuned for embedded, and a properly tuned embedded system is more likely to be compiled from source or INCREDIBLY minimal packaging. In addition I can't imagine running systemd on embedded systems as it's a bit heavy for systems with slow CPUs and small memory spaces.

Hell, a basic Redhat / CENTOS install is better tuned for embedded than Debian, and that's not saying much.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[thegarbz]

And then deal with the fact that the versions are EOL and you're running without patches.

You're talking about an application where the state of the art is Windows XP which has been EOL for quite a while now. This is not even remotely a concern for the vendors and thus not a major selling point for Debian.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Khyber]

"If your POS terminals are directly connected to the internet"

Well, how else do you expect corporate to push those new inventory prices to every store across the nation?

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the older POS machines that don't include card terminals are often running OS/2, not even Linux or Windows. With a card terminal, it has to be a bit newer for security and communication reasons.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, they read the new inventory prices off a firewalled server which is current and patched. The POS terminals are firewalled to only allow them to connect to the server, nothing can directly connect to the terminals.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

Natsemi Geode GX2 and all AMD Geode CPUs should still work.
Unlike the Cyrix MediaGX and the earlier MediaGX based Natsemi Geodes, they support the full i686 instruction set and CMOV.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[F.Ultra]

Or else if he must run Debian he could compile from source and change the default cflags from i686 to i386. This is only about the binary distribution of Debian and not of the source distribution.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[slashdot_commentator]

If the Quark is meant for entry into SoCs (for smartphones, tablets, compute sticks), then Quark will probably be abandoned.

If the Quark was meant for IoTs, then Intel will still probably support the product line.

But no way Intel is trying to fight to get into the "arduino" hobbyist market. And I suspect people who are really butthurt over Debian dropping embedded support are just Stallman fanboy hippies who think FOSS will make a difference in the embedded market. There's no reason to run linux on oven microprocessors; embedded development is just on a whole different paradigm than linux OS.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Khyber]

>firewall

And here's where you're immediately dismissed, because firewalls are notoriously broken.

This also doesn't cover for the fact that many stores don't share the exact same inventory, let alone carry the exact same product.

If only you had actual retail experience, you'd understand why your solution doesn't work. Well, if you had any technology chops, you'd already have understood why your solution is bullshit and you wouldn't have posted in the first place.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

This also doesn't cover for the fact that many stores don't share the exact same inventory, let alone carry the exact same product.

What? That is not just wrong, but ridiculously so. How does having a fire-walled server prevent having store specific inventories? I've worked with retail systems before that did exactly this, allowing access between POS and the server only, and it certainly had no problem with store specific inventory, or even store specific prices, sales, etc... pretty much any data that an inventory and billing system would have to keep track of.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Khyber]

And, proving you don't work retail. Many things are done in-store as a local promotion. The local manager handles this, it's entirely their purview. They'll have to add the item in manually, and then send this stuff back to corporate s they can register it properly.

Systems segregation 101, son. On-site autonomy is king. Forcing anything off-site simply reeks of incompetence.

Re:Sad to see Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

The POS version of XP still gets patches, you can in fact even enable those patches for a regular version of XP just by changing a registry key.

a bit early

[luther349]

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.

Re:a bit early

[bug_hunter]

True but the previous versions of Debian should still run on them fine. (Though in the world of auto-updates who knows how viable it is to run an older OS if you want to be able to install packages on-top of it). Still being able to drop 32 bit support will make life so much easier for devs. I remember how difficult life could be when the 32 to 64 bit transition started happening and 64 bit drivers could only talk to 64 bit apps etc. I feel this is good news overall.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a bit early. The question is whether one can/will be able to download older versions of Debian that support these CPUs. There is a lot of support equipment that tends not to get upgraded.

Re:a bit early

[luther349]

its called gcc multilib and its cake to compile for both.

Re:a bit early

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They aren't dropping 32-bit x86, just 486/586-level CPUs. AMD's K5 and K6, Intel's original Pentium and the MMX version; plus a few of the oddballs you don't hear much about these days, SiS, Cyrix, IDT Winchip, and VIA(C3, I don't know if they updated their newer parts).

Probably not zero impact; but those are some ancient devices; and Debian Stable will still support them until either 2018 or 2020 depending on whether they make it into LTS or not.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

What is being dropped, is i586 support for Intel Pentium MMX (up to 233 MHz) or AMD K6 (and less common variants) - not 32-bit i686 (Intel Pentium 2/ 3/ 4 or AMD K7).

Re:a bit early

[LiENUS]

Did you try reading the summary?

"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.

It says right there minimum 686-class, so as long as you have a cpu with a design thats no older than 20 years old you're good.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not dropping support for 32 bit CPUs, they're dropping support for specific _older_ 32 bit CPUs.

Re:a bit early

[ChunderDownunder]

The Pentium Pro, which they're supposedly keeping, is a 20 year old 32bit architecture. Not long enough?

Re:a bit early

[godrik]

They are not dropping all 32-bit support. They just now require i686 at least. So pentium 2 should still be working (IIRC). And that is what, 20 years old ? So, I feel like nothing much is lost by upping this requirement.

Re:a bit early

[luther349]

yea they said i686 in the headline i should know better.

Re:a bit early

[Artemis3]

They are not dropping 32 bit support, only pre-pentium pro support, ie. 486 and Pentium.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not dropping 32 bit support, they're dropping <i686 support.
As in "CPUs that don't or don't properly implement the Pentium Pro instruction set" which dates back to... 1995.

Re:a bit early

[LiENUS]

It just said older cpus in the headline from the time I saw it. Which was when it had 0 comments and was just posted.

Re:a bit early

[bug_hunter]

Oops very true. Thanks for the correction.

Re:a bit early

[chipschap]

They aren't dropping 32-bit x86

This isn't quite on topic, but Google Chrome has already said they won't provide updates for 32 bit, which seems pretty ridiculous. And Gmail gives a warning.

I have a perfectly good 7 year old (32 bit only) Acer netbook, great for running Emacs and doing all sorts of work that doesn't involve too much in the way of graphics. I'm sure many others have similar devices.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Chromium instead of Chrome.

apt-get install chromium

Problem solved. HTH. -PCP

Re:a bit early

[mwvdlee]

In practice, support for older CPU's died out a while ago. Not because of incompatibilities but simply due to the OS becoming too heavy to run in any reasonable capacity on those CPU's.

Re:a bit early

[Guy Harris]

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.

Yeah, like devices with Pentium {Pro,II,III,4}. Those aren't being dropped.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have bought an AMD netbook instead of a crappy Atom based one.

Re:a bit early

[slashdot_commentator]

They're dropping a (mini-)generation past 486 & Pentium. They're referred to as 586 class chips. AMD K6-2s, Pentium 2s. Many 32bit CPUs are probably safe, like Pentium4 or AMD Athlon. Not sure if the early Celerons will have support.

Re:a bit early

[luther349]

my netbook is in fact amd. but so few where made 90% are atoms.

Re:a bit early

[LiENUS]

Pentium 2 is 686 class so they're safe. I believe k6-2 are 686 as well.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about "official support".

Good. Drop it.

As I used to say to the zealots who champion the old X Window -
If you're some maniac who wants to keep his 386 running on his 1200/75 modem... then fork it and maintain it yourself.

Re:a bit early

[Lonewolf666]

K6 (all versions) is listed as now unsupported on the Debian mailing list.
That would make the AMD Athlon (aka K7) from 1999 the oldest still supported AMD chip.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct. Debian i686 is actually i686 + CMOV - NOPL. This is specifically explained by Ben.

So, the K7 is supported just fine, as are a few "weird" i686. But not the K6, as it lacked CMOV.

And we require CMOV because, while it is complete crap in the early i686, it is really important for performance on the Pentium M and later... which are important because of the ThinkPads :-)

Re:a bit early

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

If you build both, both need to be tested. I'm not privy to Debian release standards, but I expect it's become harder to find community members willing to do the necessary testing on what are essentially obsolete platforms.

Additionally, eliminating platforms reduces complexity of defining packaging, and all manner of procedural things required for the release of a distro. It's not simply a matter of running GCC with a switch.

Re:a bit early

[drinkypoo]

And we require CMOV because, while it is complete crap in the early i686, it is really important for performance on the Pentium M and later... which are important because of the ThinkPads :-)

This is more than a bit wacky, though. The K6/2 is actually faster than a P2 at the same clock rate in some benches, assuming you've compiled for K6 and not just for 686. And the K6/3 is definitively faster. So P2s are still supported, but the faster K6/3 is not?

In practice, the numbers of people who will care are minuscule, but it's still wacky, even if it's gcc's fault.

Re:a bit early

[silentcoder]

>That would make the AMD Athlon (aka K7) from 1999 the oldest still supported AMD chip.

Geez that takes me back, I had it's little-brother the Duron in my main machine for quite a while around that time, later one it would become my first dedicated media player machine (hooked up to the TV to watch movies on) - which I was still using until it finally gave out about 7 or 8 years ago.

Re:a bit early

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I can understand the desire to drop 32-bit support(aside from reducing the amount of work they need to do, browsers are one piece of software that gets a real hammering from every piece of malice out there, and things like ASLR work better when you have a much larger address space); but it does seem pretty optimistic on their part.

On the Wintel side, a lot of the cheapie Atom-based systems, even pretty new ones with 64-bit CPUs, shipped with 32-bit UEFI until quite recently(some still might, if so the OEMs need a brutal beating); so they will never, ever, support 64-bit Windows. Quite a few Win8/8.1 devices are in this boat and even some that shipped with Win10.

On Google's own 'ChromeOS', all the Samsung Exynos 5-based devices are 32-bit only(the oldest of those are late 2012; but the most recent was introduced in 2014); as are the RK3288 cheapies, which all came out in 2015 at various times. Terminating support for hardware released less than a year ago seems like a bit of a dick move. All the intel-based Chromebooks appear to be 64-bit, though I don't know if any were crippled by lousy firmware.

On Android, of course, 32-bit is the rule with only the newer models even based on SoCs that support 64 bit operation, and more than a few of those shipping with 32-bit firmware.

It's been some time since a desktop limited to 32-bit operation showed up; but that's not as big a slice of the market as it used to be.

Re:a bit early

[Anonymous Coward]

In the end, there are a lot more i686-class boxes with CMOV that benefit from CMOV, than those which either don't have it, or don't benefit from it. So, the K6 and friends were axed. As you said, the numbers of people who will care are very small.

OTOH, if we screw the Pentium M, Pentium 4-M, and 32-bit-only Core Solo and Atoms, the number of people who care will still be *quite large*, and there are a lot of DDs in that group, so we actually have a workforce that cares about these boxes and do the work to keep them working well, as well as a sizable userbase.

Re:a bit early

[petermgreen]

I'm not privy to Debian release standards

They basically boil down to if the package builds and noone reports that it's broken (either because it's not broken on because noone actually tried it) then it gets shipped. Some packages have build time test suites but of course that only tests that the package works on the CPU the autobuilder happens to have, not on the minimum CPU for the port. Maintainers usually do some testing before uploading but generally only on one architecture unless they are working on an architecture specific bug.

Re:a bit early

[tlhIngan]

On the Wintel side, a lot of the cheapie Atom-based systems, even pretty new ones with 64-bit CPUs, shipped with 32-bit UEFI until quite recently(some still might, if so the OEMs need a brutal beating); so they will never, ever, support 64-bit Windows. Quite a few Win8/8.1 devices are in this boat and even some that shipped with Win10.

But it's not really a big problem, either because those cheap tablets only had 1-2GB of RAM. Installing 64-bit Windows doesn't get you much on a system that's not maxed out on RAM to begin with.

And there are plenty of recent systems that still use i486/i586 architecture - typically embedded systems. I had one which emulated a 486, and it was tricky enough getting Linux running on it since most of the distributions insisted on an i586 or higher. Managed to find one supporting i486 which booted and ran fine.

x86 compatible processors are a-plenty - there's more out there than Intel/AMD/Via

Re:a bit early

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's true that there is minimal advantage to 64-bit Windows on a 1-2GB system(it might even be slightly worse since 64-bit binaries are a little larger); but it is a bit of a dealbreaker if the program you are trying to run is no longer provided in 32-bit form, which chipschap said was happening with Chrome at some point in the relatively near future.

We aren't yet at the point where many(if any) programs you'd actually want to try to run on an Atom with 2GB or less of RAM are 64-bit only; but it is unlikely to become less common as time goes on.

Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Shame

[Dwedit]

Where's your pre-Pentium II machines that need support?

Re:Shame

[luther349]

or arch or gentoo. there only killing off the mmx line i586 not p2 and up those will still run. but yes ubuntu is way to bloated and really Debian itself i moved away from debian based to arch based and its so much faster.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You might like Free or NetBSD on the older hardware. Personally I'm really annoyed with some of the places Linux as a whole is going and might switch myself.

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

My home border router is a pentium MMX 233 with 128mg ram and 512mb compact flash card running natively on the pata interface. It has multiple uplinks, load balances, provider fault resistance and runs a VPN server for me when I'm traveling and for my friends for playing games

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch dropped support for 486 and 586 years ago, while Slackware will still work on a 486.

Re:Shame

[LiENUS]

Arch has been 686 only longer than debian so.....

Re:Shame

[chipschap]

I open up a terminal, and type in ps aux. A huge gigantic list comes up

......

I miss the good old days...

You can still run one of the minimalist distros, and I'm guessing you'll like it.

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, and not running a graphical environment gives me longer battery life.

In a way, it's like the good old days. In those days you could get a lot done with a text interface. That hasn't changed. You still can do a lot.

Re:Shame

[tom229]

While I prefer the way my lawn used to be as well, I can't really fault distributions dropping support for 20 year old hardware. Every year there's new hardware you have to support and developers and maintainers have to spend their time wisely. So, you have 20 year old hardware? You'll just have to use old packages, or fiddle with the source to build your own. Even the kernel as of 3.7 dropped i386. Why? Well, it was a massive pain to maintain, and people running 30 year old hardware are probably fine running old versions of the kernel. There's not much to see here. Most commercial developers have 10 year support cycles - were taking about 20 year old hardware here.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many applications, and use-cases, where you do not need a top-of-the-line CPU to get the job done....Well, at least there is still Slackware

So, in other words, your whole rant was kind of pointless. As you sort of said, there are many use cases for linux, with Ubuntu and Debian covering some of those, while Slackware covering others, like the one you mentioned. Debian still works fine one $10 surplus computers I pick up every so often for various projects or charity work. I would have to go out of my way to find computers old enough to be affected by this change, and needing to use one of them would be a lot more niche than simply complaining about not needing a top-of-the-line CPU.

Re: Shame

[tom229]

And it needs the newest Debian packages to run? That's what we're taking about here.

Re:Shame

[Khyber]

Most touchscreen POS systems from ELO and other similar companies.

They're on 386/486 hardware. Go look at your Taco Bell or Del Taco or non-McCafe McDonalds systems.

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Fascinating. The P 233 MMX was released almost exactly 19 years ago.

I don't understand why you haven't replaced it, though. That CPU alone pulls about 18 Watts -- and we're talking full blast with no voltage stepping or any power-saving features whatsoever. The machine including motherboard, RAM, NICs, and an ancient inefficient power supply have got to pull way more than that. For an always-on device, that has to cost more in electricity over a few years than the price of replacing it with something far nicer. Even at 9 cents / (KW/hr), we're talking about $10/year difference in power cost between just the CPU alone vs a 6 watt top of the line wireless router that could run open-source software. (and much of that power goes into the wireless - a wired-only would pull much less power). I don't know what the full machine pulls (CPU, Mobo, RAM, power supply, etc) , but my bet is easily 5 to 10 times that. RAM back then was HOT.

You could probably replace the setup with a mini-PC with a 2.5 watt ATOM and enjoy cost, space, and electricity savings. If an old mac mini can pull under 13 watts, I'm sure you can find or build better and it would cost you less over time.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not a matter of practical need. It is a matter of principle. There is something beautiful about having an operating system that can run on everything from a 486 to a Core i7.

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

To correct my fellow AC:

A. If it works don't "fix" it.

B. Most newer systems today would probably require replacing a few of those "uplink" cards with PCI-E versions. (Newer systems have less full profile PCI slots. Not to mention that low-power systems tend to have less expansion slots in general. If at all.)

C. He's running Linux on it, so he would need to find a replacement board that would work correctly, especially if it's a low-power board. (Low-power boards tend to wear out sooner if kept at full power because the ACPI support for it is broken.)

D. Don't know where he stands on the whole Secure Boot issue, but if it was me, I wouldn't buy the board if I could not control it. (At the very least install my own Platform Key. I'll take any board that does not support Secure Boot at all still.) Cost of ownership and being able to control what MY system does (and that I'm legally liable for) is a higher electric bill and less space in my house? Completely worth it in my opinion.

E. Maybe he can't upfront the cost. I don't know where he lives, but if it were me, I'd have trouble if I had to suddenly replace a machine right now. (College Student.)

F. He doesn't need the higher specs. Firewalls don't need that much CPU power for a typical household setting, even if they are also used for VPNs / gaming. An old PC will easily provide the needed CPU power. Not to mention the build quality is higher than most consumer routers and will last longer. The biggest problem that a household router will typically run into (beyond lack of security updates) is bandwidth congestion. (Too many systems connecting at the same time causing the router's packet buffers to be maxed out.) The result is dropped packets. In a wireless environment, it's too many nearby networks on the same or an overlapping channel that does this. (Worse if it's caused by a device that is slower. (i.e. Wireless G network being hit by a Wireless B device on a nearby network.))

Re: Shame

[jawtheshark]

Stuff like the Soekris net5501-70 are still being sold *today*. That's a 586-class machine and it does what it must do just fine. Those have been made for low-power use from the beginning.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

The unstable branch of Debian, is probably not the first choice for an ancient POS system that nobody wants to upgrade. So how is this change a problem in that scenario?

Re:Shame

[slashdot_commentator]

You should not need [...] just to [...] browse the internet.

The HTML4 spec alone is probably too computationally intensive for P2/K6 chips to handle it. (HTML5? Ha ha...) Just try using dillo on today's webpages.

In fact, unless you are doing photo-editing work, or something similar, you do not need a graphical desktop at all.

And you don't need to buy butter in a supermarket, just churn your own butter... (I'm not on your lawn, old man...!)

I miss the good old days...

You're missing a whole retro revolution with all the hobbyist ARM/FPGA kits coming out now.

Re:Shame

[luther349]

that they are. they run on a 486/dx with a dos shell ui.

Re:Shame

[luther349]

slack still does 386 heh,

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

The HTML4 spec alone is probably too computationally intensive for P2/K6 chips to handle it. (HTML5? Ha ha...) Just try using dillo on today's webpages.

A 486 can handle HTML 4 easily. And HTML 5 is actually less computationally expensive than HTML 4. Of course web pages themselves can be arbitrarily expensive depending on their content.

Re:Shame

[ChunderDownunder]

HTML parsing isn't such an issue as the Javascript-heavy sites that advertisers track you with.

I haven't tried Noscript on a 486, mind you!

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing a whole retro revolution with all the hobbyist ARM/FPGA kits coming out now.

3.3V crap, real men only use 5V TTL signals.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

lol @ debian, its only slightly less noobier than ubuntu, fucking hipsters ruining linux, wow what a baby, apt is 4 losers who dont have 2+ weeks to set up everything by hand and then get a superior system also the packages are ANCIENT, 4 days old almost, and they actually are stable and work. fuk that shit, it brings linux to the masses and makes it easy when we all know its supposed to be about pretending to be neo. debian is 4 hipsters who think ubuntu is 2 mainstream, they just use linux because they think it makes them look cool to their retarded friends, not like us at all, we are REAL hackers, fuck debian hipsters, fuck n00buntu newbs, arch 4 life!

Re: Shame

[jawtheshark]

Interestingly, it seems that the AMD Geode LX on which this board is built, supports 686 except for one operation that isn't really in the 686 spec. It should thus work. That surprises me, but it's good news.

Re: Shame

[tom229]

Ok, so let me get this straight. Replacing a 20 year old router with something faster, more efficient, quieter, and smaller is out of the question for your use-case? Therefore package maintainers are supposed to spend countless hours per year making sure the new version of iptables can be installed from the repos for you? That's just not a reasonable request. You'll simply have to build your own packages going forward.

Re:Shame

[Khyber]

"The unstable branch of Debian, is probably not the first choice for an ancient POS system that nobody wants to upgrade. So how is this change a problem in that scenario?"

You're demonstrating that you fail to understand.

Several vendors are running Debian and then emulating DOS in a VM to run the POS software. I've worked on them directly.

Re:Shame

[Eunuchswear]

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.

[nemo@Jolla ~]$ ps aux | wc -l
280

That's on my phone. And yes, it is running Pulseaudio and systemd (but not Gnome).

What the fuck is that? It's the future, baby.

Re:Shame

[Eunuchswear]

TTL is for cheapo's. Real men use ECL.

Re:Shame

[slashdot_commentator]

lol. I did get a good chuckle from that.

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

> Ok, so let me get this straight.

Let us see if we can.

> Replacing a 20 year old router with something faster, more efficient, quieter, and smaller is out of the question for your use-case?

People do things when there's a rationale for that to happen. What you're saying is my bicycle is old; it works well, it's in a fairly good state, but I know I can buy a new one which is a lot more efficient, made with carbon fiber etc etc. I don't need it because I travel a short level path just to buy groceries, but hey, a new one it's more efficient!

> Therefore package maintainers are supposed to spend countless hours per year making sure the new version of iptables can be installed from the repos for you?

It's not for him. It's a community thing. It's for everyone. They can do it with 32- or 64-bit. They can use modern vector instructions if they need them -- but if they don't, why not compiling for an older architecture?

Should we recompile old games like the original Doom or Quake I for 64-bit? What for? Because we can? Pardon me, this is BS.

> That's just not a reasonable request.

Well, if the maintainers really are into using 64-bit even for vi, there's not much we can do except doing the packages ourselves. "I changed Pacman from 32-bit to 64-bit doesn't get you any hacker points, you know?"

> You'll simply have to build your own packages going forward.

I don't know, but this might be another "systemd". How do the Devuan guys think?

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not for him. It's a community thing. It's for everyone.

Except it is not for everyone. No single distro is going to be suited for everyone, and maintainers have to regularly make choices related to who their target audience is. When it comes to supporting older hardware, there are other options specifically targeting that.

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a lot more complicated.

I'm the happy owner of 2 machines based on that processor. While you won't be rendering Avatar 2 on them, they were once more than capable of running graphical interfaces and office applications.

What happened? Software happened. "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster" (Wirth's law).

Such computers are extremely power-saving -- all the above discussion about how much they spend is totally inappropriate with respect to them. One is being used as firewall with the excellent IPFire distribution... it worked also as proxy, but the kind folks at Netflix won't allow it.

For the other, I'd like to make it work -- just as a hacking exercise. I've already found it plays 480p media fairly well with a vlc or mplayer (it has a companion graphics chip), but not directly in the browser (no problem, you just call mplayer directly from FF). Probably video streaming will work ok (e.g. for use in a kitchen), but the audio of that machine is incredibly good.

But back to compatibility: such machines have no SSE instruction (nor SSE2, BTW). Some programs crash immediately on them (e.g. Midori, WPS office). Others show weird bugs: Freeoffice Textmaker had such an immense latency that entire sentences could be input and all chars appeared at once. Gnumeric had big icons which apparently have to do with the 120dpi screen.

Mint doesn't run: it says to use "forcepae" but apparently that works only with Pentium M and other _INTEL_ machines. That's an important point. Things should work for 586's or even 686's, but they don't.

I'm using 64-bit on my other machines. Not even a single one of them has 4GB RAM. I just tested Debian 8 with LXDE and jwm (very nice) and it works well on a 1GB RAM dual core Pentium. Xubuntu 16.04? Not so well (it seems it's locked on using webm formats, I had to use an add-on to force Flash -- regrettable, but it runs faster). Except, of course, if I use that mplayer trick. As I type, I'm downloading Debian with Xfce to see if it runs better than Xubuntu (though I'd rather have the 4.12 Xfce in Xubuntu).

In the end, it's about limited resources. Which forces some to adopt 64-bit only and forsake 32-bit, use systemd and forsake sysv init, go uefi and forsake bios, demand post-P4 CPUs and forsake non-Intel chips, support OpenGL 2.1 and above and forsake older video cards...

It's ok, we don't expect developers to stretch their resources infinitely. If they can't do it, that's it. It's their itch to scratch... but if Linux won't care about weird machines, who's gonna care about the long tail? BSD? Sorry, their concept of freedom won't last 30 seconds on a ring against any big corp.

I'm not talking about running W95 on a watch, I'm just asking why Patrick is the only guy caring about 486's? (BTW, Salix is great!)

All in all, I'd say it's very humbling for me and Linux that it doesn't run well on such elementary computers. There is an opportunity to reuse equipment which certainly is excellent for many uses and could make the joy of the next Linus.

Using an older version? Well, I suppose we can do it. But does everyone really want machines with old vulnerabilities on the Internet?

Also, now the baseline is the 686. Next year, it may go the way of the dodo and just 64-bit will work. Going on, suddenly 2GB RAM machines will be too "small" for some new feature -- and, of course, every distro will require 4GB RAM minimum from then on. Sounds crazy? Well, a few months ago 586 seemed safe, too.

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

> No single distro is going to be suited for everyone, and maintainers have to regularly make choices related to who their target audience is.

Yep, I've already written elsewhere about the reality of not having choice, contrary to all the mythical infinite choice we should have with Linux. Things to ponder about if you're rich and think you can buy the world...

> When it comes to supporting older hardware, there are other options specifically targeting that.

There lies the problem: I have now been reduced to a few distributions for my older computers. Many in essence exist because of Slackware and that great dude Patrick. Should he change his mind -- or more like be forced to, like recently about pulseaudio -- and I will have to scavenge some less known option to keep my old cpus working.

Distrowatch needs some kind of update, because distro maintainers stop doing 486 versions without any warning to the Distrowatch editors: the result is that we look for a 386-supporting distro and, for some results, a visit to the distro page means disappointment -- because we learn only 64-bit is supported.

Not a big problem, but long lists of distributions offering 386 builds are illusory, to say the least.

But for old hardware, sometimes the problem is not even the OS, but the applications, which get heavier and heavier.

Re:Shame

[armanox]

Actually it doesn't - IIRC Pat added something a couple versions ago that made it 486 only (and Linus dropped 386 at kernel 3.7 IIRC too), and (A) I don't think anyone noticed before he said something, and (B) he suspected it didn't care or have the hardware to check. How many distributions even bother to test on 486 and Pentium era hardware anyway?

Re: Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Replying to myself, it is actually even more complicated than I initially thought:

1st] Debian live boots in a Geode LX800 machine (which is a 686, as already discussed). But Debian installation fails. Why? Because Debian notices it's a 686 CPU and proceeds to use a corresponding kernel variant. Except it won't work, because recent 686 kernel images are built with PAE (also to offer the NX non-execute protection). All this is done in a menu which says just "Boot Debian" -- not "Boot 686-kernel".

2nd] Fortunately there's an advanced option which allows booting a 586 kernel image.

The problem -- and here is where things go awry -- as the news say we're gonna have 32-bit support, but just for 686 (no 586 anymore). And... with PAE.

That means 686 will not be fully supported, too. Bye-bye Debian on Geode...

And unless I'm wrong, PAE is not needed in most of these older PCs... because they originally had 3 to 4 GB RAM maximum.

Re:Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

> It is not a matter of practical need. It is a matter of principle. There is something beautiful about having an operating system that can run on everything from a 486 to a Core i7.

Well said, but I'd go further: food without spices is also nutritive but it takes the joy out of the meal.

Practical people have no zest. It's not about "it just works", it's like an adventure game where you find the secret to open the door.

Aside from that, if one must entertain a practical view, those PCs still matter for a plethora of non CPU- or memory-intensive tasks -- router, firewall, proxy, printer server, file server etc. When you have more than one computer at home, it makes sense to have some services available to all PCs.

20 years is probably enough

[tom229]

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.

di3k

[Anonymous Coward]

there are about 700 it was fun. If I'm achieve any of the by clicking here end, we need you For membership. every chance I got grandstanders, the as to which *BSD track of where = 1400 NetBSD of BSD/OS. A [nero-online.oRg]. area. It is the I READ THE LATEST to yet another and its long term faster, cheaper, has significantly Influence, the series of debates States that there The rain..we can be NIGGER community [mit.edu] found NetBSD posts on users. BSD/oS for a moment and only way to go: Creek, abysmal continues in a Teeth into when racist? How is the system clean stand anymore, rules are This

But will Lunix

[Anonymous Coward]

still support the 6502?

Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[tom229]

No kidding. Today's kernel is 75mb. That's larger than the entire capacity of IDE drives I had back then.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Khyber]

"It's difficult to imagine that that processor still has the grunt to run an OS these days."

What, did you forget that pretty much everything you're doing RIGHT NOW is exactly the same stuff you were doing back on Windows 95/98? Playing games, surfing the web, watching videos (not streamed, usually from VCD or DVD) and maybe getting some work done.

Nothing has changed. People just got shitty at programming.

MenuetOS shows this off quite well. It does everything. Even runs Quake. Full GUI, supports all kinds of shit.

1.4 Megabytes.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's kernel is 75mb? Really?
Perhaps you are right if you include all the features, and all the device drivers for every single piece of hardware that is supported.

But if you compile your own kernel, and only include drivers and features that you actually need, then it is much smaller. My kernel image is around 5MB, and kernel modules are disabled. I did not spend much time disabling things that I do not need. I could probably get it down to 4MB while still retaining all the functionality and features that I need.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[fnj]

Today's kernel is 75mb.

75 millibits, huh? You sure about that? That's less than 1/10 of one bit.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[luther349]

yep win 95/98 boxes where doing the same things your i7 box is doing now. in fact mine had a dvd rom and video card and tv card. nothing has relly changed other then the internet steaming everything now.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[LiENUS]

Except now we're using h264 and h265 which provide far greater quality than vcd or dvd, and the tv card is 1080p on modern computers, your display resolution on modern computers is higher. All of these things drastically increase how much ram and cpu your system needs. Web browsing also now includes things like tabs, spellchecking, h264 video built in, built in audio, 3d rendering. All things that the old 95/98 boxes didn't do on a stock install.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop with an SSD boots Manjaro Linux in less than 3 seconds. I remember my computer from 2002 cost way more at the time, and used approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds to boot the system, even when it was brand new.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[thegarbz]

Yeah I know. I was watching 1080p YouTube in a browser with 40 tabs open displaying dynamic content while simultaneously doing a backup and a virus scan all while waiting for fallout 4 to finally load the next area in a windows game on my second monitor in the 90s.

Except I wasn't. If you think the things we do now are even remotely comparable to back then, even basic things like word processing then you need your head checked.

Now boot up windows 95, fire up IE4 and post a reply to me from that machine. I dare ya.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, spellchecking wasn't a new thing back in the 90's. It was just that browsers were too new and too busy trying to take over the world by fighting over/defining or defying all kinds of standards and using their own to care about stuff like "user comfort", and Opera had tabs even back then. Besides, tabs SAVES memory (compared to firing up new instances) so it actually counters your whole argument.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[cyborg_monkey]

No need to be cunt (although you probably cannot help yourself).

foad.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh- not quite true.

Those old machines can do all of that, because of real programmers wrote the code. Look at RPi today even less powerful 95/98 machines, and they are doing the it all now.

What we have seen is more and more junk being done by the processor, to make "cheap" add-on cards. We use to have "co-processors" to off load the main the processor. Example SCSI cards, that handle the bus and retrieving the data, passing to main system a full fetched block of data, instead the cpu polling and receiving a byte at a time. I had a Rage card with it own independent ram while 4MB VGA cards were still top end. Again it off loaded the cpu so it could process data not draw a picture.

Ever wonder way a IBM PC Color was so slow? The video card controlled memory bus, so CPU only would work during the horizontal and vertical fly-back, hence less than 1/4 of it processing ability. This was to maintain a stable picture. Today, we are doing the same thing again with video ram and main memory ram both being the same ram.

New big "fast" processors are not solving the fundamental problem of poor design, since they cramming more and more stuff in to the processors to do. So the added power is already being used , so no added power to you. Hence today top end machines are just as fast to user as those of 6 or 12 years ago, because of poor deigns in both software and hardware.

Look back at airplanes of WWI, for an example of not knowing what was wanted. More wings were added to give more mobility, but more speed was what was wanted.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[LiENUS]

Besides, tabs SAVES memory (compared to firing up new instances) so it actually counters your whole argument.

I'm not aware of any browsers from that era that used a new instance for every window, hence why in IE when one page crashed all of the windows would close too. Tabs cost more memory because you're more likely to open more tabs than you are multiple windows.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[LiENUS]

Raspberry Pi does all of the fancy stuff like h264 decoding in hardware using the GPU. The machines of 95/98 could not decode h264 in real time.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Khyber]

"and the tv card is 1080p on modern computers, your display resolution on modern computers is higher."

That's not exactly true. Before everyone went to 1920x1080 in the 2000s, we had 2048x1536, and that was the 90s.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Khyber]

"Now boot up windows 95, fire up IE4 and post a reply to me from that machine"

I just did you one better and did it from Windows 3.1, on dialup, using Netscape Comunicator, on a Pentium 75MHz Toshiba Satellite Pro CDS100.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly the same stuff

Playing games, surfing the web, watching videos

Nothing has changed. People just got shitty at programming.

Is there a special bus that takes you to school?

There must be, because if you compare the state of gaming, websites and video today to the mid 90s, you have to be pretty damned special to come up with, "people got really shitty at programming" for an excuse as to why your AMD K6-2 isn't cutting it.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Microlith]

2048x1536, but 2D only unless you had a super high end full length PCI/AGP graphics card.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the least subtle plug for a project ever.

Also you're a child molesting furry, your opinion is invalid.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

Developer time is more expensive than CPU time.

Menuet OS is nice as a hobby project, and it probably has some niche uses. But an OS written in *assembler* is way too hard to maintain.

try to port *that* to an ARM chip .

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right. because old Netscape communicator can handle a modern version of slashcode enough to post a comment. Piss off.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[santathehutt]

And it only took 5 hours ;)

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Khyber]

It can. Disable JavaScript crap and images, everything loads fine.

I HAVE copies of SlashCode. It's fucking available for public download, you goddamned moron. Try it for yourself instead of opening your mouth and proving you know precisely jack shit.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the display resolutions are lower now than they were. CRTs had higher resolutions until this latest generation of displays.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

Pics or it didn't happen.

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[drinkypoo]

Except now we're using h264 and h265 which provide far greater quality than vcd or dvd, and the tv card is 1080p on modern computers, your display resolution on modern computers is higher. All of these things drastically increase how much ram and cpu your system needs.

My system encodes and decodes h.264 and h.265 in hardware, you insensitive clod! And since the data is transferred via DMA, I barely need more CPU. In fact, many Android systems can play accelerated video without even leaving low CPU states. Basically all video operations are accelerated, and have been since the later Windows 3.1 days...

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[thegarbz]

No shit Shirlock.

Interesting that you mention the method. So you're effectively saying you're not using Slashdot even remotely the same way that everyone else is using it currently.

Thanks for proving my point

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Khyber]

Except with JavaScript disabled, THE SITE WORKS.

Meanwhile, you can enjoy having your stuck 'Working' icon after a post and not having the post show up.

Deuces, sucker. Learn to code and keep your mouth shut until you do!

Re:Intel Pentium with MMX from 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they didn't.
IBM P220. 3840x2400. 15 years ago.

I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo... No chance. Whilst there may be no technical limitation the build times would be horrific. Probably take a week just to do an initial update on the stage3 never mind installing anything new.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[Dahamma]

Maintaining useless old CPU architectures costs time and money. Given you can buy a Pentium 4 class CPU for $3 (or a quad core 2.8GHz i7 for $50), and a good developer's time is easily worth $100 per hour, it just plain doesn't make sense to support 20+ year old Intel chips.

If you believe differently, well - GCC is an open source project. How much are you paying to use it? Support it yourself, or spend $100 and get a new i686 capable computer.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

That guy would be best served throwing all of that P90 crap in to the recycling bin.
Replace it with a raspberry pi or beaglebone black and it will pay for itself in electricity savings in a couple of months,

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

New CPUs come with backdoors, but you knew that allready

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you silly slashdotters, only reading obviously wrong summaries. GCC has not dropped anything. The binary package gcc in Debian has been configured not to support 686.

That's a pretty big difference.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[serviscope_minor]

I am a little less peeved at debian dropping support for it than GNU dropping the ball with GCC support.

What are youtalking about?

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs...

GCC still supports the original 386.

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

What are you talking about "douchey changes". Many of us acknowledge that technology advances and don't like being stuck with languages which were the state of the art in the late 90s. And C++11? You're complaining about a 5 year old language standard? I'd hate to hear your thoughts on C++14.

it's basically required to have a modern compiler even for many apps/libraries that predated it.

Huh? The old code didn't magically break and neither did the old compilers.

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.)

Except (a) no they don't and (b) no they don't. Although at this point I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to cross compile on to such an old machine given you could buy a $25 RPi will hammer it in terms of speed and cross compile from that.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even an MMX, a Pentium 90 from 95ish.

It still runs fine, has 64 megs of RAM

So, it doesn't even have enough RAM to run any of the current web browsers. Not exactly something to brag about.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even developer time. You need to *test* it actually works. That means a tester, but also maintaining at least one physical test machine. Even if it would "just work" as compiled, it still would cost a few hundred dollar per release (Debian includes quite a few packages, and you'd need to smoke-test all of them to see if they all at least start.)

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anybody but a 15 year old worry about bragging rights?

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Predius]

Happily running Gentoo on Soekris 4501s and 4801s still...

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[KiloByte]

a modern linux distro with systemd is worthless on it, so debian is already automatically out

While systemd is, sadly, the default, Debian does support two saner rc systems: sysv-rc and openrc. And those run just fine on 64MB RAM on i386, or less on certain other archs (s390x needs 20MB, powerpc and mipsel 32MB, etc).

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck me, can we please stop the mindless systemd bashing. You people are a bunch of zealots at this point. It is designed to be used on embedded systems with even less memory and it works just great. Systemd is much simpler and has a much smaller footprint than outdated init systems that depend on a pile of scripts. It is much easier to dev for and maintain, and in practice is much more reliable and predictable. It is just a much more elegant solution and this is why all distros are switching to it, so get used to it. There's no conspiracy, just every distro engineer who isn't beholden to some dogma can see systemd is far better than any other init system out there.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably using binary packages built on another machine which is cheating.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Predius]

Nope, full native build and operation. I've used distcc in the past with my faster Seagate GoFlex Net to speed up build tests on it but my Soekris boxes are full standalone setups running code built locally.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can spend $30 on a Raspberry Pi and have 8x the RAM and who knows how much more CPU power. And still be able to run a modern Debian.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[MachineShedFred]

If you're that worried about back doors, don't plug it into a network.

And make sure your tinfoil hat is secure on your head - I think it's slipped a bit.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[MachineShedFred]

Don't forget that the square footage of real estate necessary to keep all of those test machines is worth more than the machines you're putting on them, to say nothing of the electrical cost of running the tests.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[mrchaotica]

What you do is cross-compile on your modern box.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[KiloByte]

If you're going to troll, could you please at least say something semi-believable? As the penance, please start two VMs, one with systemd one with sysvinit and compare memory usage.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Microlith]

If you're going to troll, could you please at least say something semi-believable?

Just because you hate systemd doesn't mean he's trolling.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said that the old ones don't?

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would imply dropping all the actuall guzzlers a lot faster. Like, oh, athlon, pentium 4, and what came after.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[jandrese]

I still have a machine from that era, but when I'm honest with myself there is very little reason to run it anymore. For the amount of computing power you get out of it the power consumption is ridiculous and pretty much anything it can do can be done much faster on a $35 Raspberry Pi for much less power. The Pi ends up paying for itself in lower electricity bills quite quickly. About the only thing it's still good for is installing super old distros to run ancient applications (like old Loki ports) that are impossible to run on modern hardware and don't work properly in VMs.

Re:I was running one within the past two months.

[JThundley]

Or even spend $5 and get a new ARM processor on a Raspberry Pi Zero.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[mattventura]

It is just a much more elegant solution and this is why all distros are switching to it, so get used to it.

No, distros are switching to it because the GNOME monkies made their DE dependent on it. Debian can still be run on sysvinit, Gentoo I think still defaults to OpenRC, embedded distros (contrary to your assertion) aren't exactly in a hurry to switch to it either.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not every machine out there is used to browse the web. There are these new things I'm sure you heard of called "servers". Browsing the web with a modern browser means jack shit to most computer literate people. And the fact that modern browsers are bloat ware, is a real problem. You have one job, render the webpage. Show me the output. That's it.

Bragging? Why would one have to brag about having a modern browser? What is this a pissing contest? My how your views are small. You must be a teenager. Reminds me of my son, so young and naive.

Re: I was running one within the past two months.

[Anonymous Coward]

No but telling lies and having an agenda are trolling. Nothing in his post is true. It's all here-say. He made up some points(that are false) to try to get people to believe Systemd is the bestest thing ever.

That's shilling and trolling to me. Your definition may very ol' head.

Possibly a mistake

[BlueCoder]

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....

Re:Possibly a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

They are dropping support for Pentiums in their testing distro. If someone is running a Pentium (as if), they'll be stuck on ancient applications anyway. If it's mission critical, they certainly won't be going anywhere near debian testing; the OS and programming will be set in stone.

So why don't you bog off elsewhere with your pathetic Daily Mail retard level of hyperbole and stick your whizzbang up your... Twat.

Re:Possibly a mistake

[KiloByte]

It should rather be downgraded to a second or third tier platform.

That'd be possible if i386 variants were implemented as separate architectures, like it's been done with 32-bit ARM: arm armel armhf arm64ilp32. Besides getting ABI improvements that make use of new hardware, you can keep previous ones without slowing down everyone else. In the meantime, i386 uses an abysmal ancient ABI, changing only the requirement for minimal instruction set, breaking the "arch designation gnu triplet" bijection everyone else keeps.

In theory, you can have a separate repository rebuilt against a lower -march like Raspbian did, but looking at all confusion and incompatibility with external repositories that plagued Raspbian, no one wants that can of worms.

That's why the 586 variant didn't find a home in -ports AKA "second class architectures", like m68k, alpha or hppa.

Re:Possibly a mistake

[jez9999]

I remember the days when the Pentium was the latest and greatest CPU, you insensitive clod!

Re:Possibly a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

"The question is what are you targeting? Only modern whizbang systems? Sounds like Apple."

oh come on, they are dropping Pentium 75 generation up to P III. Systems that are considered obsolete even in underdeveloped countries.
And with huge energy consumption, these machines should be asap replaced by arduinos/raspberry pi's etc. - more computing power, use ~1W of power instead of 50W+ (up to 400-500W). Yes, they will probably last 5 years or so. Then, you'll be able to replace them again for another $30, which is surely less, than saving on energy bill (even including price of labor to replace system)

Re:Possibly a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were the days when every RISC CPU performed several times better than a Pentium, and when Intel was thought to be under threat from RISC, due to which Intel and HP put together the Itanic. Not just the Alpha, but other CPUs, such as PowerPC, PA-RISC, SPARC and MIPS all had performances several times that of Intel's 'top CPU'. Of course, that changed later, particularly after Microsoft unified all code bases to NT, but until then, RISC was running circles around x86

Re:Possibly a mistake

[david_thornley]

I remember the days when the Z80A was the latest and greatest CPU chip, and nobody ever put Linux on it in the first place, you insensitive clod!

Why all the comments?

[wnfJv8eC]

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.

Re:Why all the comments?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to whatever rock you hide under. Yes, many of us still use ia32. And, unlike you, I am actually a DD and put a lot of work every month to keep Debian working well on both amd64 and i686.

There's no way we are dropping support for Pentium M and later for a while yet. Too much good hardware runs on those, and yes, they run slightly lighter Debian (somewhat slow gnome, passable kde, very good anything else like fxce/lxde/awesome/etc) just fine. Perfect for coding, text processing, IRC, email, and doing non-compilation-related Debian work on a gorgeous IPS 4:3 display during plane flights. Way too many such laptops do not have Core2 processors (before that, long mode either didn't work or did not work well enough on Intel processors).

Re:Why all the comments?

[mrchaotica]

Dump ia32. Don't even simile as you do it.

What's wrong with dumping it "like a _____"?

Summary is incorrect-ish

[SeattleLawGuy]

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.

Re:Summary is incorrect-ish

[LiENUS]

The summary clearly says

Changes are happening in Debian's development branches which will make older versions of the 32-bit architecture obsolete.

It doesn't say dropping all 32-bit just older versions of the 32-bit architecture.
It also clarifies it even further.

"Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle.

Yes if you just read one poorly quoted line from the summary and fill in the blanks with random gibberish it looks like debian is dropping support for all cpus and will only run on your neighbors abacus. If you read the actual summary it specifies minimum of 686-class for 32-bit intel debian install. Nothing about dropping i386 support just moving it up to 686-class processors.

Re:Summary is incorrect-ish

[thegarbz]

So his mistake is perfectly understandable.

Why stop there? Why not just read the first word and call yourself an expert?

If someone can't be arsed reading a summary that is approximately 7 sentences long they simply shouldn't comment on the subj.... oh look at the kitty. Kids these days have such short attent... man I need a coffee, is it home time yet?

NT4

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, people, did someone complain when in 1996 Microsoft killed support for the 11-year old 386 in Windows NT 4?

huuuge mistake

[superwiz]

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.

Re:huuuge mistake

[jouassou]

As many others have said already: they're not killing 32-bit support. They're just killing support for the i386, i486, and i586 architectures. But all i686 processors, meaning most 32-bit x86 processors since the Intel Pentium Pro was introduced in 1995, are still supported. In my opinion, this is a good thing: almost nobody uses i386 processors anymore, and restricting support to i686 and above permits the compiler to optimize code much better for those processors. So for people using Pentium Pro and above, this will likely increase the performance of their hardware if done right.

Will the last person still using an Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

please turn the lights off when you're done. thanks.

So.. Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ancient Architecture Comeback!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Ancient Architecture Comeback!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Linux has always required a 32-bit processor, so in the Intel world that's a 386. So no, no, no, no, and yes (the 68000 can run Linux).

64-bit

[ledow]

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.

Re:64-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

More silly rumor created by MS. 32 bit CPUs top out at 64GB not 4GB, but Windows refuses to support it, so the VM host has no such limitation.

Re:64-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

32-bit under Linux is not limited to 4GB. Thanks to PAE, you can stick 256GB into a board. xD Further, some 64-bit libraries are broken (WINE, I'm looking at you) and ialibs isn't always magic.

Re:64-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with this viewpoint. It is wasteful to get rid of old stuff just because new stuff is better. We should be building products that last as long as possible. Reduce reuse recycle should be thought as a hierarchy. Reduce first; reuse when you can't; recycle what you can't reuse. Recycling isn't efficient enough to be step one.

Re:64-bit

[EvilSS]

More silly rumor created by MS. 32 bit CPUs top out at 64GB not 4GB, but Windows refuses to support it, so the VM host has no such limitation.

Wow! If only Windows 32 bit supported PAE... Oh wait... It does. It's just that PAE is a shit solution to getting over the 4GB Address space barrier no matter what OS you use.

Re:64-bit

[Just Some Guy]

It is wasteful to get rid of old stuff just because new stuff is better.

It is wasteful to keep using old stuff. Most of the biggest computing advances in the last few years have been in work per watt. Today's CPUs aren't dramatically faster than one from just a few years ago, but thanks to huge markets in mobile computing they're far more power efficient.

All the systems discussed in the story and in these comments are the equivalent of driving a lawnmower to work. Sure, you can, but it's going to be way slower and enormously worse for the environment than upgrading to a modern fuel-efficient car.

Re:64-bit

[ledow]

Read:

Virtualisation.

It's wasteful to have ten separate high-powered servers, pulling more than a lot more clients would, sitting pulling lots of power (and redundant power, and UPS power) and yet sitting relatively idle when they could share a machine quite happily.

It's wasteful to keep old junk running just because it's what you're used to compared to new, energy-efficient stuff. It's wasteful to have to have machines that are churning their disks and getting hot because they only have a few Gig of RAM where an extra 4Gb RAM chip costs a pittance.

Nobody's saying "ditch everything you have immediately", We're saying "All the hardware you have almost certainly supports this already". And I buy "new old" stock - i.e. obsolete models of machines but still new in wrapper - and they are all 64-bit capable. This isn't ditching stuff that you just got, this is just that you ALREADY have compatible gear but you've put the wrong software on it so that it's limited and more difficult to maintain than if you'd just installed the 64-bit versions.

Seriously, hands up if you have a production machine, not involved in something specialist, but just an ordinary "client" that's simply not capable of 64-bit instructions? Nobody? There's a reason for that. And, in fact, as pointed out the article is actually talking about even more ancient machines than that (early Pentium's!).

We're talking machines that you can't run any modern version of Windows or Linux on out-of-the-box most likely. But, no, let's keep them around because otherwise "it's a waste".

Hint: I've never worked in a company that had a policy that kept clients for more than 4 years, and they WOULD just throw out "working" machines that old just to save on maintenance costs that would start cropping up (disks and fans start to die). We'd be talking four, five or even six rounds of throw-out and complete client replacement in such places for the hardware mentioned, just as a matter of course.

Re:64-bit

[drinkypoo]

Today's CPUs aren't dramatically faster than one from just a few years ago, but thanks to huge markets in mobile computing they're far more power efficient.

Sure, and in theory you could replace all your big power-hungry desktops with spinning rust and desktop CPUs with tiny little fanless NVMe SSD-based plastic bricks with mobile CPUs in them, and they'd have just as much oomph. But you'd have to actually pay for all of them, and your current computers are working fine, and such machines actually aren't all that inexpensive unless you buy garbage brands.

All the systems discussed in the story and in these comments are the equivalent of driving a lawnmower to work.

I should hope that few people in the first world are even still using these machines as desktops as an affectation or a curiosity. I rather suspect that they are still more in use in the third world, which may have some shiny internet cafes but which does take a pretty significant portion of our cast-offs, albeit mostly laptops. What I'd be more concerned about is the embedded world, where cores this antiquated are still in use. Granted, little of that hardware ever gets (or can sustain) an update of any kind, but it seems a shame to increase the likelihood that it is destined for a landfill before it ever even hits the used market.

Re:64-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

Re:64-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

I should hope that few people in the first world are even still using these machines as desktops as an affectation or a curiosity.

I never understood this mentality. Do you have any idea how many people there are on disability, welfare, food assistance here in America alone? These people don't replace equipment because there is a newer model they replace it when it dies or someone they know gives them a new version free.

Re:64-bit

[drinkypoo]

I never understood this mentality. Do you have any idea how many people there are on disability, welfare, food assistance here in America alone?

Do you have any idea how many more modern PCs are getting landfilled (or, hopefully, recycled) in America alone? I've got one here that I got at the local thrift store as part of a lot that cost $10 all together... with a ~2 GHz C2D.

Re:a bit early - great lie

[Anonymous Coward]

* 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.

Re:Finally - growth up

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What's different between 686 and 586?

[dlenmn]

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?

Re:What's different between 686 and 586?

[danbob999]

There are a few instructions added with the Pentium Pro. And some others with MMX. Both may be required now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:What's different between 686 and 586?

[Anonymous Coward]

Different optimisations and feature sets. PAE (for >4GB of physical RAM), started with the P6 architecture as an example. There were a bunch of new instructions, have a look elsewhere on wikipedia.

Re:What's different between 686 and 586?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were a good number of architectural and feature changes. For example, PAE (>4GB of physical RAM) was new with the P6 architecture.

Have a look elsewhere on wikipedia for more info on instruction set changes, some of which could have a decent impact on syscall and block operation performance.

A minor concern, but still a concern ...

[MacTO]

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.

lazy takers...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you weren't a little bitch, you could backport security updates yourself and pass them back upstream.
Or even start running your own public repository to do the same.

Disingenuous argument

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Disingenuous argument

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're not able to replace the old connectors for old devices, then you deserve everything you get. Enjoy hiring a personal development team to maintain security updates.

Re:Disingenuous argument

[Dahamma]

First bringing up money then going "oh and but the software is free" doesn't fly.

Free as in open source, not money, dumbass. Obviously. Open source software still costs in terms of money/resources/opportunity cost.

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.

Show me the companies worth paying developers to maintain enough 20 year old systems to pay for several developers full time... I bet you can't. The efficiency gain of power usage to performance alone would have justified replacing them over a decade ago.

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"*,

Did you even RTFA? They are dropping Pentrium support. P4-class are still seriously old and you can get hardware serial ports. Not to mention you can still get "hardware serial ports" on PCI cards if you really want...

Embedded, SCADA

[drwho]

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.

Re:Embedded, SCADA

[jandrese]

Are you installing Ubuntu a lot on SCADA controllers? My impression is that most equipment like that keeps the OS it shipped with and maybe a couple of updates from the vendor directly if you're lucky.

NetBSD

[Artemis3]

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?

Guess I have to hold off that upgrade...

[Anonymous Coward]

to Ubu 16.04 on my PDP-11.

Memory with those ancient CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Older process CPUs are more robust

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Wait - what about embedded applications?

[eclectro]

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.

I'm safe right?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Sun Ultra-5 will still be supported right? That's not "old" is it?

In Soviet Russia ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... older CPUs be droppink support for you!

New TLS is limiting factor for old Windows

[tepples]

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.

What to replace your netbook?

[tepples]

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?

Re:Finally - growth up

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Why the concern for 4 GB?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Bad PR of Debian team I suppose

[imort.kz]

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!