ArchLinux ends i686 support | Hacker News Reader

ArchLinux ends i686 support

archlinux.org

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[multilib] repo is still supported (lib32 packages for x86_64).

This is just the "pure" x86 distribution.

https://www.archlinux.org/news/phasing-out-i686-support/

https://www.archlinux.org/news/the-end-of-i686-support/

And the community is taking the torch and will continue to provide updates and isos.

https://archlinux32.org

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, good news since it means more work on architectures people use. On the other hand, this means there is really just _one_ architecture which usually hurts portability, and that matters if arch linux ever decides to support arm or something.

https://archlinuxarm.org/

I've had Arch Linux ARM on an N900 for the past 5 years.

So thinks a bit offtopic,but I'm working on running Alpine Linux on the N900. What did you do about those damn powervr SGX blobs? What GUI do you run on your N900 (xfce or ??)

I used a package with N900 firmware blobs. I didn't build it, so I'm not sure how they were set up. More info here: https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=81892 As for GUI, I used enlightenment, which worked decently well on a small screen.

Isn't that what www.postmarketos.org is doing?

Yes, I actively contribute to that project.

OK great. I was just afraid you were not aware of that effort and thus duplicating it.

Arch on ARM works really well though. Has been my daily driver on Raspberry Pi for a couple of years now.

ArchLinux really is great for ARM, and hobby projects in general. I've struggled to get even Debian running on my Chromebooks multiple times, but the first time I tried Arch it just worked straight out of the box.

Former archlinux developer here (maintained the haskell stack, coq, built an aur git repo, math packages, created 100s of packages, etc.), I think that this is a good thing:

I never used i686 even though I built for it.

The way I built packages was on my local laptop (clean chroot). Building for 2 separate architectures involves building 2 separate packages. This doubles the time it takes for a developer to build. This might not be that bad for smaller packages, but ghc (haskell compiler) took a long time on my computer. This means that if it takes an hour to build ghc, it would take 2 hours of my time to actually build ghc for both platforms. When you're talking about 100s of packages built many times over several years, this quickly adds up.

The other benefit from removing i686 support is that the packages built for that architecture were never really tested by developers. I ran x86_64 10 years ago, tested the x86_64 version of my packages, and most of the time pushed them directly to the main repositories if everything checked out. For more critical packages, I would push them to testing, let people report any issues, and then move them after a couple of days. This means that I never knew if i686 broke or not. This was the case with most of the developers at the time.

A bit random question, one which qualifies as "I'm here too long and I'm afraid to ask now" territory: what's the difference between i686 and x86_64?

How those two architectures differ?

32 bit vs 64 bit

short version: i686 is a 32bit architecture, and x86_64 is a 64 bit architecture. It adds things like larger registers (and more of them).

"For users unable to upgrade their hardware to x86_64, an alternative is a community maintained fork named Arch Linux 32. See their website for details on migrating existing installations."

https://archlinux32.org/

Wasn't this their April fools joke not too many years ago?

This is the only April first post I could find: https://www.archlinux.org/news/the-canterbury-project/

Which isn't related

2009, apparently. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_April_Jokes#...

There was a small backlash about this a couple of years back when someone suggested dropping i686 support in the forums.

Apparently no one even noticed this time.

In 2009 the Core 2 family (Intel's first real 64-bit consumer processors) was just under 3 years old, it's over a decade since then and even low-end Atom's are full 64-bit chips now - there's little reason to continue to support 32-bit systems considering their age (and anybody running them should really upgrade, these older systems are terribly inefficient both in general performance as well as power draw).

anecdotally, people are regularly throwing away/throwing in the recycling perfectly good core 2 duo desktops from the 2008-2009 era with 4GB of RAM, video cards with DVI interface that will drive a 1920x1200 monitor, etc. Anything older than that from the P4 generation has likely gone to the recycler long ago.

A Core 2 Duo desktop is not what I would consider "perfectly good" anymore, for the exact same reason I threw my PowerEdge 1950 in the trash - these older chips will use more power to get the same job done, DDR2's significantly higher voltage than DDR3 plays a huge role here as well. They may perform acceptably, but you're paying more in the long run via your power bill.

The target audience of a refurb Core 2 desktop has no overlap with the camp that will have their PC on enough to even bring power efficiency into consideration. The hundreds saved reusing an otherwise-waste computer would take decades of rising power bills to make back during which even the new system would probably die well before you broke even.

Even just going from a system with a Core 2 Duo E8400 to something more recent like an i5-2400 can result in 50W savings or slightly more at idle. This can be a big difference in areas with high energy rates (PG&E is something like $0.25/KWh) when you consider not only idle power draw, but also general improvements to performance and power efficiency making the CPU take less power when under everyday load and also returning to idle faster. You could easily save $30 or more a year, especially considering most people could get away with the iGPU and use even less power driving a PCIe graphics card.

There's plenty of people offloading sandy bridge or newer systems at this point and they're dirt cheap, being that I live in Boise, ID the power savings of desktop components aren't terribly important to ME - but I realize I live in a little bubble when it comes to cheap electric rates.

>There's plenty of people offloading sandy bridge or newer systems at this point and they're dirt cheap

I recently picked up a couple Ivy Bridge Core-i3 Dell Optiplex desktops for under $100 each to replace some older machines at work. Totally worth it, and they came with Win 7 Pro, which can still be upgraded for free to Win 10 Pro. I'd imagine by this time next year Haswell desktops will have fallen to the same price.

Not much of a shock. Their primary use case is what---power users' desktops? Those have been 64-bit for almost a decade. Other uses: anything low-power is ARM, even small dinky laptops (remember netbooks?) are 64-bit, and RAM is cheap enough that it doesn't really matter that your pointers are double the length.

My old Asus eeepc is an Atom N270, fiercily 32 bits only :)

Maybe you can find an used Atom N280 model, they're dual-core and 64-bit (I owned one)

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