Fedora 27 Might Do Away With 32-Bit Kernel Builds

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 27 Might Do Away With 32-Bit Kernel Builds

A controversial change being considered for Fedora 27 is doing away with the i686 kernel build thereby effectively dropping support for older x86 32-bit systems...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-27-Might-Drop-i686-Kern

[stevenc]

The computer *industry* prefers we throw old hardware on the scrap-pile, so its employees will not be paid any more to maintain 32-bit kernels. There's an ever-widening niche for an operating system that would keep old hardware useful and so avoid having to pay for new hardware to be produced, and shipped (and the many costs of disposing of the old).

So what are good options to make use of:

686-class EeePC with 1GB RAM (still available to buy used)
AMD Geode 586+CMOV (686-compatible) (available in bulk, pre-owned)
486-class embedded systems (still produced today)
Athlon K7 desktops?
Intel Pentium-4 PCs?
Intel Celeron(P6/Netburst) laptops?
Intel Pentium-III servers?

OpenBSD comes to mind. I think Debian cannot run XFCE+Firefox with less than 1GB RAM nowadays.

[R41N3R]

There are still plenty of Linux distributions with 32bit support, so for a bleeding edge distribution the step to switch now to 64bit only makes sense.

[tomtomme]

The computer *industry* prefers we throw old hardware on the scrap-pile, so its employees will not be paid any more to maintain 32-bit kernels. There's an ever-widening niche for an operating system that would keep old hardware useful and so avoid having to pay for new hardware to be produced, and shipped (and the many costs of disposing of the old).

So what are good options to make use of:

686-class EeePC with 1GB RAM (still available to buy used)
AMD Geode 586+CMOV (686-compatible) (available in bulk, pre-owned)
486-class embedded systems (still produced today)
Athlon K7 desktops?
Intel Pentium-4 PCs?
Intel Celeron(P6/Netburst) laptops?
Intel Pentium-III servers?

OpenBSD comes to mind. I think Debian cannot run XFCE+Firefox with less than 1GB RAM nowadays.

Why Fedora? Why BSD? Just use one of the i686 LTS distros still out there. And I bet even for Fedora there will be a community-generated i686-kernel somewhere.

[Zan Lynx]

There is always Debian stable. An architecture isn't truly dead until Debian stops carrying it.

[eydee]

It's fine. Those exotic x86-only computers that still exist can't properly run Gnome anyway. And that's the main flavor of Fedora, isn't it?

[DrYak]

At some point you have to realise that if you're still running specialist architecture like 32bits x86 chips (some old hardware, or some weird embed platform),
you'll also need to use some specialist linux distribution like a custom tailored Gentoo.

Mainstream Linux distros (like Fedora) are going to stick with what it available on mainstream computers (64bits x86_64 chips) and concerntrate their efforts where most relevant.

That's the beauty of Linux and it's freedom of choice, there's always other solutions better tailored to you needs. (which usually end-up being Gentoo and similar when you need the most tailoring).

[mulenmar]

Given that when I tried it, Fedora was a Segmentation Fault-ridden mess for anything not in the default install, I find myself dereferencing a null pointer trying to find a care to give. :P

[sheepdestroyer]

Yeah, maybe we could now start choosing a new baseline and build against something a bit more modern than amd64 which limits us to 2001's SSE2...

Would be great to have a modern distro applying modern build parametters (for a new hw minimum set at 6 yo SNB for instance : SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AES-NI, etc...).

We could have amd64 for old decrepit stuff, and a modern variant for anything newer than 6 years old

[eggbert]

The computer *industry* prefers we throw old hardware on the scrap-pile, so its employees will not be paid any more to maintain 32-bit kernels. There's an ever-widening niche for an operating system that would keep old hardware useful and so avoid having to pay for new hardware to be produced, and shipped (and the many costs of disposing of the old).

So what are good options to make use of:

686-class EeePC with 1GB RAM (still available to buy used)
AMD Geode 586+CMOV (686-compatible) (available in bulk, pre-owned)
486-class embedded systems (still produced today)
Athlon K7 desktops?
Intel Pentium-4 PCs?
Intel Celeron(P6/Netburst) laptops?
Intel Pentium-III servers?

OpenBSD comes to mind. I think Debian cannot run XFCE+Firefox with less than 1GB RAM nowadays.

Old pentium 3 and 4s should be scrapped. It cost more to run these old machines. Why even bother when you can buy a $30 raspberry pi that outperforms these old clunkers while using a small percentage of the power consumption.