Debian 9 "Stretch" Drops PowerPC As A Release Architecture

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian 9 "Stretch" Drops PowerPC As A Release Architecture

The Debian Release Team has decided upon the official release architectures for next year's Debian 9.0 "Stretch" release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-9-Release-Architectures

[Min1123]

With this being PPC/PPC64, we're talking about older IBM machines, some routers, and PPC Macs not being maintained. Since PPC64LE is on the list, that means this doesn't affect the newer OpenPOWER initiatives, so it's probably just forward-looking.

[bug77]

You'd think they'd drop i386 before dropping PPC, but whatever... I don't have any use for either.

[Trevelyan]

"i386" is just the archive name for 32bit x86. In Jessie you can't use it with anything below 486 (without fuss). Although in terms of the kernel image, you probably want 686. I could imagine that Stretch may make the next step. i.e. the i386 archive/suite requiring minimal 686; thus dropping the 486 kernel images.

[Ardje]

You'd think they'd drop i386 before dropping PPC, but whatever... I don't have any use for either.

Unfortunately AMD and intel are not the only one creating i386 arches...
There is also the vortex, which is a big waste of energy and terrible slow, but somehow they still seem to sell it.

[CrystalGamma]

And here I thought this was about dropping all POWER … at least mention it like "(32-bit) PowerPC" in the title …

[roys]

So does this mean that there is no big endian architecture left? I have a debian PowerPC qemu vm to test my code under a big endian cpu.

[AndyChow]

So does this mean that there is no big endian architecture left? I have a debian PowerPC qemu vm to test my code under a big endian cpu.

I believe s390x is big endian.

[danieru]

Are they dropping support for POWER8?

[danielnez1]

I installed Debian Squeeze with Window Maker and GNUstep apps on my old PowerMac 5500. It was pretty snappy, even when running on the base 225 MHz 603e. It could run Mac OS X 10.2 at a push, but it was dog slow by comparison. I also have a Sonnet G3 500 MHz upgrade card that plugs into the 5500's L2 Cache slot (I kid you not) but could never get it to boot with that enabled.

While it's sad they are removing support for old PowerPC machines, I understand their rationale, and at least there is still NetBSD!