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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".
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.
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.
They are not dropping 32 bit support, only pre-pentium pro support, ie. 486 and Pentium.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
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!
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.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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.
Arch limited themselves to 686 or newer some time ago.
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"
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.
No need to run the latest distributions on a POS terminal. Just get an older one.
"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.
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.
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.
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".
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++
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
"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
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."
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.
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
it said dropping 32 bit and i686 there not dropping i686.
Pay attention! Processors, processors, processors!, not 32 bit
FTFA:
[1] The following processors, supported in jessie, are now unspported:
* AMD K5, K6, K6-2 (aka K6 3D), K6-3
* DM&P/SiS Vortex86, Vortex86SX
* Cyrix III, MediaGX, MediaGXm
* IDT Winchip C6, Winchip 2
* Intel Pentium, Pentium with MMX
* Rise mP6
* VIA C3 'Samuel 2', C3 'Ezra'
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When ram is less than 4gb, i use i686. Of course you could also ask: Is there anyone with less than 4gb of ram? And the answer is: yes, and they should stick to i686 simply because 32bit apps consume less ram.
To avoid throwing away old gear, even if linux drops support for the older 32bit cpus, you could always use something like Netbsd, which still officially supports i486. I particularly use OpenBSD with very old machines, simply because you can (net)install it using a single floppy.
A typical Pentium might not have usb, but usually has a floppy drive.
And if you still thinking why?, well there are enthusiasts, and there are people living in poverty or in countries with serious problems.
These computers used to run w9x which has long been abandoned, and yet they can still be useful with a modern *nix like OS. If it works, and getting Raspis is impossible; why not?
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
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.