A Proposal To Go 64-bit Only With Fedora 23

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Proposal To Go 64-bit Only With Fedora 23

An ambitious proposal is seeking to make Fedora 23 -- the Linux distribution release due out around October -- 64-bit-only for both x86 and ARM architectures...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-23-64-bit-Proposal

[xeekei]

I think abondoning 32-bit ARM seems very unwise, but 32-bit x86 should die really.

[Cyber Killer]

"die already" - well thank you very much, my atom netbook with 2GB of ram works still pretty ok today :-P. Same thing for numerous late pentium4 era machines - with memory upgrades they are pretty usable web browsing computers still. With lightweight desktops these computers can easily have a second life.

I'm ok with not advertising 32bit x86 versions of distros, but it's still too early to get rid of them entirely.

[Drago]

"die already" - well thank you very much, my atom netbook with 2GB of ram works still pretty ok today :-P. Same thing for numerous late pentium4 era machines - with memory upgrades they are pretty usable web browsing computers still. With lightweight desktops these computers can easily have a second life.

I'm ok with not advertising 32bit x86 versions of distros, but it's still too early to get rid of them entirely.

Any idea why you can't keep them running with one of the latest 32bit distros, and just update the web browser?

[kaprikawn]

"die already" - well thank you very much, my atom netbook with 2GB of ram works still pretty ok today :-P. Same thing for numerous late pentium4 era machines - with memory upgrades they are pretty usable web browsing computers still. With lightweight desktops these computers can easily have a second life.

I'm ok with not advertising 32bit x86 versions of distros, but it's still too early to get rid of them entirely.

Yeah, but you don't need to run Fedora on those machines right? As long as you have a viable option that's ok, there's always going to be more conservative distro's that you can use. Stick with Debian or something on older hardware.

Fedora is forward thinking and one of the more cutting edge distros that isn't rolling release. I applaud them for being gutsy enough to push the envelope with their policies.

[schmidtbag]

I think abondoning 32-bit ARM seems very unwise, but 32-bit x86 should die really.

I agree completely. 64-bit ARM is pretty much only used in servers right now and Fedora, to my knowledge, isn't a very popular server distro. Red Hat, SUSe, and CentOS are far more common in servers (if we're looking at RPM-based distros).

[duby229]

focusing early on 64bit arm support gives them a heads up I think. amd64 should have been the primary focus on x86 since at least 2007. I mean hell, this is 8 years over due. Hopefully early focus on arm will prevent the same dumb ass shit from happening there too.

[vadix]

I agree completely. 64-bit ARM is pretty much only used in servers right now and Fedora, to my knowledge, isn't a very popular server distro. Red Hat, SUSe, and CentOS are far more common in servers (if we're looking at RPM-based distros).

As far as popularity goes, I think Linux distros running on ARM is just about to pick up. We have the Raspberry Pi and other ARM dev boards, but most of those wont be used as primary devices. The new AArch64 chips are going to be useful for primary devices; the Snapdragon 810 supports DDR4, which should enable some interesting things this year (though it seems their advertised 2.8GHz clock rate made the core too hot for passive cooling). Also, 64-bit ISAs give you an enormous address space for virtual memory allocation, which is very nice to have and optimize for. I can imagine that this might be one of the reasons he wants to push 32-bit ARM aside to a secondary platform. Really, I can't imagine anybody desperately needs AArch32 Fedora. However, I definitely see how there will be an upcoming surge in AArch64 usage. Also, I think people will still want to use the old x86 (IA32) Fedora on some old machines, but nobody has been making those in forever, and I can see why they are done maintaining that (though I am not sure if they themselves maintain "secondary" platforms?).

Disclaimer: I don't use Fedora, but I respect it.

[Kivada]

I think abondoning 32-bit ARM seems very unwise, but 32-bit x86 should die really.

No, 32 bit ARM is largely useless as theres no drivers for any of the hardware and no comodity hardware, on the other hand the new 64 bit ARM SoCs are being first targeted toward servers and with companies like AMd producing 64 bit ARM SoCs the driver situation should be far more condusive toward OSS, so building up the base of pakages for them and leaving 32 bit ARM behind is a much better use of resources.

[Wilfred]

[...]Same thing for numerous late pentium4 era machines - with memory upgrades they are pretty usable web browsing computers still. With lightweight desktops these computers can easily have a second life.[...]

With the power consumption of P4 machines, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a new system?