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Debian Dropping Support For Older CPUs (distrowatch.com)
An anonymous reader shares DistroWatch's report that the Debian distribution will soon be dropping support for older, 32-bit processors.
The Debian project supports a wide range of hardware architectures, including 32-bit x86 CPUs. Changes are happening in Debian's development branches which will make older versions of the 32-bit architecture obsolete. Ben Hutchings provides the details:
"Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle. This means dropping support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors. (Support for 486-class processors was dropped, somewhat accidentally, in Squeeze.) This was implemented in the Linux kernel packages starting with Linux 4.3, which was uploaded to Unstable in December last year. In case you missed that change, GCC for i386 has recently been changed to target 686-class processors and is generating code that will crash on other processors. Any such systems still running Testing or Unstable will need to be switched to run Stable (Jessie)." Hutching's announcement includes a list of processors which will no longer be supported after Debian "Jessie".
The Debian project supports a wide range of hardware architectures, including 32-bit x86 CPUs. Changes are happening in Debian's development branches which will make older versions of the 32-bit architecture obsolete. Ben Hutchings provides the details:
"Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle. This means dropping support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors. (Support for 486-class processors was dropped, somewhat accidentally, in Squeeze.) This was implemented in the Linux kernel packages starting with Linux 4.3, which was uploaded to Unstable in December last year. In case you missed that change, GCC for i386 has recently been changed to target 686-class processors and is generating code that will crash on other processors. Any such systems still running Testing or Unstable will need to be switched to run Stable (Jessie)." Hutching's announcement includes a list of processors which will no longer be supported after Debian "Jessie".
I wanna hear from you, Slack users! Is it a viable alternative on older desktops?
yea it seems debian and ubuntu just love shooting themselves in the foot.
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.
It's turtles all the way down.
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.
its called gcc multilib and its cake to compile for both.
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.
"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.
The Pentium Pro, which they're supposedly keeping, is a 20 year old 32bit architecture. Not long enough?
yea they said i686 in the headline i should know better.
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.
really? Are there many embedded system processor that run intel's instruction set i586 and older ?
While it's still possible people would want to run Linux on hardware this old, it's unlikely you're going to be happy with the newest kernel/packages on hardware 20 years old. Finding a copy of an old centos (for example) and compiling old versions of programs manually should be acceptable for any hobbyist in this situation.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
They are not dropping 32 bit support, only pre-pentium pro support, ie. 486 and Pentium.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Where's your pre-Pentium II machines that need support?
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.
The processors they are dropping support for, according to the mailing list, are approximately from the Windows 95 era of computing.... AMD K6 ( a tad newer ) and Intel Pentium / Pentium W/ MMX. That's Win9.x era hardware that even if you could get XP to boot on, it wouldn't be a fun experience.
Frankly I don't know how anyone is still running a usable system on that ancient of hardware without custom tuning the hell out of their kernel and applications anyway, as those systems had extremely small amounts of RAM.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Debian Dropping Support For Older CPUs
It doesn't say anything about 32 bit or i686 in the headline.
Just says older cpus.
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.
Oops very true. Thanks for the correction.
It's turtles all the way down.
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.
i686 a.k.a. Pentium II is only 19 years old
Arch has been 686 only longer than debian so.....
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.
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.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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"
And it needs the newest Debian packages to run? That's what we're taking about here.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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.)
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
No need to run the latest distributions on a POS terminal. Just get an older one.
No kidding. Today's kernel is 75mb. That's larger than the entire capacity of IDE drives I had back then.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Use Chromium instead of Chrome.
apt-get install chromium
Problem solved. HTH. -PCP
You might be surprised how snappy a P-Pro 200 feels on the desktop with a lightweight setup such as xfce. But thats definitely a situation where its better to recompile. Recent mainstream distros and their derivatives are absolute pigs with little if any regard for efficiency. Modern distros remind me of firing up a full-blown JVM for a simple text editor
C|N>K
ahem, pentium pro, late 1995.
The main difference was that the Pentium II added MMX.
It should rather be downgraded to a second or third tier platform. The pentium is not going anywhere those machines will still be running in 50 years still. So long as you keep replacing the caps the machines that survived are proverbially like tanks in comparison now.
The question is what are you targeting? Only modern whizbang systems? Sounds like Apple.
Even if those old systems didn't have much they got the job done just fine. The chief problem was and always has been lazy developers that don't know anything about efficiency and streamlining. When I was a kid... you had to make due with 256KB of memory... Databases, spreadsheets, BBS servers....
You kids and your holodecks....
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.
I have a couple of custom built routers using Cyrix 586 clones that this will likely affect. Mind you, these are probably reaching EOL anyways, but if I want to keep them going into the future, I'm sure I can throw another distro on there. Crappy little processors, but fine for iptables, QOS and traffic/intrusion monitoring.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And then deal with the fact that the versions are EOL and you're running without patches.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
What "embedded" systems are still being made with old school pentiums?!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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".
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.
Is there is a person under a rock running ia32 system still? Thousands of developers, using their free time need support them? Dump ia32. Don't even simile as you do it. Just dump it.
as low end machines where all 32 bit until just a few years ago so many are still in use.netbooks embedded etc.
I guess it's a good thing debian isn't killing off 32 bit support isn't it?
Did you try reading the summary? It says right there, minimum 686 class. Not that they're killing 32 bit support.
He did read the summary. The summary states that Debian will be dropping support for "older, 32-bit processors." There should not have been a comma. The comma makes "older" and "32-bit" coordinate adjectives rather than having "older" modify "32-bit." It is written as if the 32-bit processors are the older processors. And while technically both adjectives apply and it is ambiguous, the implication of a normal reading would be that 32-bit processor support was being discontinued.
Unless you read the whole summary and happened to know which of the processor families have a 32-bit architecture. But many people aren't going to bother when the first sentence says they're discontinuing support for "older, 32-bit processors."
So his mistake is perfectly understandable.
Real lawyers write in C++
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.
You're paying more in electricity than it would cost to replace those machines.,
I'm always fascinated when people make these claims because in my experience every "upgrade" uses more power.
My current setup: Two motherboards (I think both VIA but I might be wrong on one of them), ADSL bridge, wireless access point, couple of hard drives plus ancient 1Gb SSD disks which plug into a PATA connector, small switch. The whole lot draws 60W from the mains supply and will run off a single 12V 60W power supply although I run from two as the system is unstable at power on unless you carefully bring it up bit by bit.
One of those machine won't boot with a -686 kernel. It's really hard to find any (fanless) Intel compatible motherboard that draws less power.
If we assume that system is drawing 30W then it's costing me around 50GBP/year. Even if we could get it down to 20W (and I suspect I could if I replaced the spinning disks with SSD) it would only save me around 17GBP/year (which is why I have more pressing demands on my time than rebuilding the FS on SSD until the disks start failing - especially as every month I wait means I can save more on the price of an equivalent sized SSD than on the electricity I'm spending keeping the spinning disks running.
In fact, my primary reason for wanting to upgrade to SSD is because currently my system is almost silent. I'd love it to be completely silent.
I can't see replacing the motherboard can save me more than pennies in electricity. I can buy something enormously more powerful but I cannot find (fanless) motherboards that sip power. I'm experimenting with an Intel Atom fanless board and Xen to see if I can sensibly run everything on a single machine now which might realistically save me 20W but the new setup has got to work for a very long time for the electricity savings to cover the value I place on my time for getting that all setup.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
You mean jumping off the arduino train. They just killed that whole line about two weeks ago, in a strategic product lines reorg.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
75 millibits, huh? You sure about that? That's less than 1/10 of one bit.
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.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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.
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.
my netbook is in fact amd. but so few where made 90% are atoms.
that they are. they run on a 486/dx with a dos shell ui.
slack still does 386 heh,
They did?
I thought they were just dropping their smartphone Atom SoCs.
The Quark is a completely different chip.
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.
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The C3 Ezra (on their list) was introduced in June 2002 (and ran at 1GHz). Definitely not a Windows 95 era machine. It ended up in quite a lot of low-power Mini-ITX systems where, for reasons of form factor and cooling, upgrading the CPU is typically not an option.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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Pentium 2 is 686 class so they're safe. I believe k6-2 are 686 as well.
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.
Technically Geode Processors should work, They're not missing anything from the official 686 spec. But certain combinations of build tools rely on the NOPL instruction which they are missing (but isn't part of the actual 686 spec).
And in the first line of the story it says "An anonymous reader shares DistroWatch's report that the Debian distribution will soon be dropping support for older, 32-bit processors."
Which isn't what the distrowatch headline says at all, and further in the summary it clarifies that with:
Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle
as in 686 is the minimum.
jesus christ.. in every single one of your posts on this topic, you have fucked up some version of they're, their, and there.
In fact, you haven't used the proper spelling for the word you have used A SINGLE TIME.
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!
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).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"Modern distros remind me of firing up a full-blown JVM for a simple text editor"
Come on man. This is slashdot. A car analogy is mandatory here. e.g. Using a Ferrari to take your trash to the landfill.
(BTW, I just upgraded my eight year old Linux system to a more modern system in order to run a "modern" web browser. Aren't all these new features great? Actually, No. Mostly they are at best different ways to do something that worked fine the old way. At worst, they are outright annoying. On top of which I seem to have acquired dozens of new bugs that I'll have to track down and exterminate one by one. What ever happened to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?")
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
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.
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.
C - the footgun of programming languages
That's probably a fair indicator as to the underlying reason for their failing to understand the summary and to accuse it of being clickbait.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Interesting. Thanks. I will take a look at that.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
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.
The first i686 processor was the Pentium Pro and was introduced November 1st, 1995.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
Yes. That's why they teach punctuation in primary schools, though many people never manage to learn it. Those people shouldn't become editors.
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.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
>people are trying to repurpose old hardware and go "look it still works" rather than "I can do something fun with this"
Those are not mutually exclusive things. Some people think that getting ancient hardware into a workable state is a fun thing to do. A friend of mine managed to pick up an original apple II at a pawnshop, he spent weeks on the extremely arduous task of making workable boot disks for that thing on a modern system - and now it sits on his kitchen counter doing nothing but running a clock program.
It's a serious conversation piece, a digital piece of modern art deco and he enjoyed doing it. So maybe the only use an apple II has today is as a glorified wall-clock but there's something special about a working piece of history that important - after all, the apple II was the machine that began the PC revolution.
The 386 is equally important a milestone - that was the CPU that first brought 32-bit support to PC's, that the first Linux kernel was written on, that I played Descent and Doom on as a kid (Doom on a 386 was pushing the very limits of it's abilities but it worked).
And the 486 was the system that made PC's ubiquitous, for nearly 10 years it was intel's flagship product. How many CPU's before or since were market leaders for a full decade ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the Stretch release cycle
as in 686 is the minimum.
The bit you quoted is confusing because it is wrong, however, because Debian is wrong when they call it an i386 architecture.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was having a conversation with another IT Manager friend of mine and he expressed that he would "have to test for 64-bit Windows" at his site now.
My jaw hit the floor. I mean, seriously? Granted, we both work in schools so the clients aren't exactly beefy, but the amount of use they get and they hadn't gone past 4Gb (or likely even TO 4Gb properly!) or onto 64-bit operating systems? And at no point had bothered to say "I wonder if these machines I'm intending to use for the next 4 years will actually support 64-bit versions of our software that I will no doubt need to rollout in the future?"
And the guy had some kind of fixation with printer drivers on 64-bit. There I was thinking "Well, if your managed print providers can't handle a '64-bit compatible' printer driver in this day and age, maybe it's time to look for a new one"
I was pushing out 64-bit Windows years ago, and the only "problems" I ever had are that basically you have to push 32-bit Office for best results, but that will change with Office 2016 rollouts no doubt.
On Linux, I don't even look but I'm fairly sure the default is 64-bit for just about anything vaguely recent (Ubuntu LTS from about, what, at least 10.04 or before has had 64-bit?). I know I've had to install the 32-bit libs on Ubuntu more than once over the last five years or so, for certain programs.
I hate to see support for old hardware dropped, as much as anyone. I tinker with old junk, especially the junk that my workplace can't make use of any more. But, come on. 64-bit? You MUST at least have checked compatibility and taken it into account when purchasing by now.
You SHOULD at least have migrated to 64-bit everywhere practical already (yes, I still have 32-bit devices, but they are thin-clients, or used for things like digital signage and thus I just don't care as they aren't critical and are easily replaced if I need to).
And if you've not done this already, this article and maybe the other comments here are the kick in the teeth that you need to do that.
Especially with 32-bit now instruction sets - how the hell have you been virtualising your stuff with only 4Gb RAM? Or are you not even there yet either? And if you ARE stuck with 32-bit on hardware / operating systems that need 64-bit, guess what technology you need to look into? Virtualisation.
Honestly guys, I have about 5% of my client stock that can't do more than 4Gb RAM because of motherboard limitations but even they support 64-bit operating systems and instructions as a matter of course.
For a desktop-focus operating systems, 64-bit should have been the default for, what? Nearly a decade? I'm not sure, it's so long ago that I needed to worry about it.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
CMOV if I recall correctly
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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)
I've looked at the wikipedia page for both the Pentium (586) and Pentium pro (686), and I see that the pro made significant changes under the hood, but I don't see differences in terms of the instruction set (although I may not be reading the article close enough). If the instruction set for the 586 and 686 is identical, then why drop 586 but not 686? I realize that the 586 is slower, but that alone doesn't seem like a good reason to drop support. What am I missing?
The processors being dropped are admittedly ancient and are unlikely to see much use. If any other distribution was dropping it, I would not be concerned in the slightest. The reason why I have an inkling of concern is because Debian is the base for many other Linux distributions, and Debian is designed in a way that is easy to adapt for many low end systems.
I'm not going to lose any sleep over this decision. If I ever had the need to use hardware with such an old processor, chances are that it would require older software on top of an older distribution on top of an older kernel anyhow. (And chances are the need to use such an old processor would be to drive hardware that requires Windows or DOS rather than Linux.) Still, it is worth discussion.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The AMD Elan / Geode does have CMOV support. I've got Gentoo running on one with a hacked kernel that id's and treats it as a 686 class CPU instead of 486 and so far no issues. I should collect my changes and see if I can get them mainlined...
It's the historical name debian uses for 32-bit intel cpus. It's not a reference to the generation but rather to the capabilities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"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?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
it said dropping 32 bit and i686 there not dropping i686.
Pay attention! Processors, processors, processors!, not 32 bit
FTFA:
[1] The following processors, supported in jessie, are now unspported:
* AMD K5, K6, K6-2 (aka K6 3D), K6-3
* DM&P/SiS Vortex86, Vortex86SX
* Cyrix III, MediaGX, MediaGXm
* IDT Winchip C6, Winchip 2
* Intel Pentium, Pentium with MMX
* Rise mP6
* VIA C3 'Samuel 2', C3 'Ezra'
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
TTL is for cheapo's. Real men use ECL.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
When ram is less than 4gb, i use i686. Of course you could also ask: Is there anyone with less than 4gb of ram? And the answer is: yes, and they should stick to i686 simply because 32bit apps consume less ram.
To avoid throwing away old gear, even if linux drops support for the older 32bit cpus, you could always use something like Netbsd, which still officially supports i486. I particularly use OpenBSD with very old machines, simply because you can (net)install it using a single floppy.
A typical Pentium might not have usb, but usually has a floppy drive.
And if you still thinking why?, well there are enthusiasts, and there are people living in poverty or in countries with serious problems.
These computers used to run w9x which has long been abandoned, and yet they can still be useful with a modern *nix like OS. If it works, and getting Raspis is impossible; why not?
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
The computer has one job, and it does it will. You don't need a faster computer if it does what you need fast enough. Especially figuring out how many times a program is just sleeping.
Oddly enough Linux and Debian in particular are not that popular for standard desktop usages. But Linux and Debian tend to find their way into servers and appliances.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Jessie still has full 4 years of support on it, so you have plenty of time to upgrade, assuming these machines survive that long.
Crappy little processors, but fine for iptables, QOS and traffic/intrusion monitoring.
For these uses, I'd recommend any random cheap ARM SoC. These can be bought for 1-2 months worth of electricity bill for that 586, and most of newer ones can do gigabit Ethernet that I don't think you could get for 586.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I can forgive them for ditching support for products that haven't been sold in two decades.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Being a grammar nazi is all well and good, but you fucked up your capitalization and missed a period in your ellipsis. You may want to step outside of your glass house first the next time you decide to start slinging stones.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah, except they aren't killing 32-bit support. They're killing support for ancient 32-bit processors like the Pentium MMX and AMD K-5 series.
Oh, I'm sorry - did you still want to run brand new software on your 10 year old CPU? Neither did anyone else. This is a complete non-event - the modern 32-bit CPUs (Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, Xeon 3-digit, Athlon, Duron, Celeron variants of the previously mentioned Pentium lines, Atom, etc.) will all still work.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I can forgive them for ditching support for products that haven't been sold in two decades.
Can't be too many of those things sitting around, and any that still exist are probably okay running whatever is on them now.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Pentium Pro is 20 years old, and used an insane amount of electricity to do what it does in comparison to what could be had for less than $125 now. Even an Atom-based SBC from today can do what that Pentium Pro 200 could 7 or 8 times faster, and do it using like 20W of power, maximum.
The electricity savings alone would pay for deleting that ancient hardware and replacing it, much less that fantastic increase in processing power for what is literally Intel's current lowest end x86 CPU.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I've got a MSI AM1I and an AMD Sempron which, although it apparently has a 25W TDP, is running just fine with a fanless heatsink. (The power supply in that system has a fan, but that's because I threw in one I had lying around, not because I think it needs it.)
I'd be willing to bet that with some underclocking / undervolting it could get under 20W system TDP. For all I know, my build might be under 20W average power as-is.
My goal was a cheap build, not explicitly a low-power one -- the mobo+CPU+RAM+heatsink+case was well under $100 and I reused an old PSU and hard drive -- but I think it could suit your needs as well.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
2048x1536, but 2D only unless you had a super high end full length PCI/AGP graphics card.
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
True, they were good space heaters. My last Ppro box has dual CPU's on a full-size board with no fans....still sitting there ready to go. Current top-of-the-line CPU's are around the same thermal envelope tho IIRC which is valid because the PPro was the top chip in its day. (actually that is even debateable, IMHO PA-RISC and Alpha blow them all out of the water but those aren't exactly common consumer items)
C|N>K
I like my Atom board, but a used laptop would be more powerful than ancient hardware while using less power. A low-power laptop with the screen off might only use 15W under full load, and about 5W idle. You could also use one of the machines as the WAP.
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.
lol. I did get a good chuckle from that.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
And it only took 5 hours ;)
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.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
All those single board computers (SBC) like what are used in nuke plants might need updates to prevent hacking. I hope this doesn't melt the thing down somehow.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
>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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
It's the historical name debian uses for 32-bit intel cpus. It's not a reference to the generation but rather to the capabilities.
Yes, but like I said, it's wrong, especially since they dropped the actual i386 a long time ago.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Crappy little processors, but fine for iptables, QOS and traffic/intrusion monitoring.
For these uses, I'd recommend any random cheap ARM SoC.
Alas, all the random cheap ARM SoCs have a single ethernet interface. If you want multiple ethernet interfaces and a decent ARM core, you jump right back into PC money. For some of these uses, that's fine. For others, not so fine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now boot up windows 95, fire up IE4 and post a reply to me from that machine. I dare ya.
That might have worked when Slashdot Media was still owned by Dice and redirecting most HTTPS page views to HTTP, as Slashdot still supports basic functionality without JavaScript. But now that Slashdot redirects HTTP to HTTPS, Internet Explorer 4 is unlikely to support the required TLS version and cipher suite.
All I really care about at a fundamental working level is Emacs (I'm a writer and text mode suits me for many things). My seven year old Acer netbook works fine for these simple needs
My needs aren't much higher than yours, other than that I use Xfce. What do you plan to buy once your Acer netbook breaks, now that the product category is largely discontinued?
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
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!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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...
I don't think that this is really a problem. 586 CPU is not common around here for few years already, if not for more, can't say for sure! But Debian team needs to be more PR professional I believe, because many of readers will think that Debian will drop x32 support at all!
AMD's original Geode - GX2 (used in their predecessor to One Laptop Per Child, a.k.a. the Personal Internet Communicator - later sold as the DECTop) doesn't have CMOV. All "Geodes" are not created equal. It would be interesting to see what the TDP and clock rate on these things would be on todays chip technology.