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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

The language is incredibly frank, and I agree with it completely. The retro-computing hobby doesn't need the ability to run contemporary operating systems.

It's insane that x86 Debian is still compiling all software targeting Pentium Pro (from 1995!).

x64 Debian is a bit more modern, and you must splurge for a CPU from 2005 (Prescott) to get the plethora of features it requires

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> It's insane that x86 Debian is still compiling all software targeting Pentium Pro (from 1995!).

Debian 13 raised the x86 requirement to Pentium 4 because LLVM required SSE2 and Rust required LLVM.

The target before was not Pentium Pro in my understanding. It was Pentium Pro equivalent embedded CPUs. Servers and desktops since 2005 could use x86-64 Debian.

> It's insane that x86 Debian is still compiling all software targeting Pentium Pro (from 1995!).

Note that Debian no longer supports x86 as of Debian 13.

Is it just the "retro-computing hobby"? There could still be businesses who might need support for old machines, especially in developing countries. I don't know the actual situation though, I'm open to the idea that my suggestion is insane.

No, it’s a valid question, and one that I’m sure will get some answers in the coming days and weeks as the discussion on adding this requirement continues, but in some sense, it’s beside the point.

The cost of supporting this old hardware for businesses or hobbyists isn’t free. The parties that feel strongly that new software continue to be released supporting a particular platform have options here, ranging from getting support for those architectures in LLVM and Rust, pushing GCC frontends for rust forward, maintaining their own fork of apt, etc.

It's much more common to find businesses running on very old hardware in developed countries, not in developing ones. Developing nations basically didn't use computers 20-30 years ago, there's no random remnants from that era beyond some extreme tail end. And, given how the PC & server market evolved in the 2000s and 2010s, it was cheaper to buy a then-current x86 than to import some ancient Alpha system from wherever. Especially so since software licenses didn't really exist in those days in developing countries - even government institutions often ran pirated software without a second thought.

Are you speaking from experience?

There's a non-negligble amount of "handed-down" refurbished hardware from developed to developing. PCs and servers that are already 5+yo and out of market at installation.

I'm sure that's true for 5-10 year old tech, as the market has changed significantly. But I'd bet you'll be very hard pressed to find any businesses running on Alpha or HP-PA or whatever other ancient architectures might not have a Rust compiler available. Especially so if you were to look for businesses running modern Debian on such systems...

Isn’t this the specific reason things like the raspberry pi were developed to solve?

It is not retro-computing. New 32-bit and x86 CPUs are produced, sold, and used today.

See (relatively recent) list of manfuacturers here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers

and scroll down for other categories of x86 chip manufacturers. These have plenty of uses. Maybe in another 30 years' time they will mostly be a hobby, but we are very far from that time.

Which ones of those don’t have MMX / SSE? Debian is not enabling any x86 instruction extensions that didn’t ship on the Pentium Pro

This is not accurate, the Trixie 32-bit release requires a Pentium 4.

Those businesses usually have very purpose-built machines. Like USG machines running windows xp in hospitals. You normally don't touch them, just isolate. You definitely don't update them to the latest OS version.

These architectures were for were high end machines at the time, universities and government agencies would indeed been the only ones buying these, and they probably migrated to commodity hardware long ago; if migrating to a PC-compatible architecture had been off the table for them, so had been keeping these things running after their EOL.

(In my second-tier university at my developing country, the Sun workstation hadn’t been turned on in years by the late 2000s, and the the minicomputer they bought in the 1980s was furniture at the school)

Edit: As for big businesses, they have support plans from IBM or HP for their mainframes, nothing relevant to Debian.

I'll first say that 32-bit CPUs, including x86-based ones, are not retro computing. They still carry the load of all sorts of important computing systems, today. They are still being produced (IIANM, also by Intel and AMD). Sure, with much more limited use cases, and it's definitely not the mainstream, but it's there. Not a hobby and not for a 'retro' experience.

But you are also completely ignoring limited-capabilities hardware, like embedded systems and micro-controllers. That includes newer offerings from ST Microelectronics, Espressif, Microchip Technology etc. (and even renewed 'oldies' like eZ80's which are compatible with Zilog's 8-bit Z80 from the 1970s - still used in products sold to consumers today). The larger ones are quite capable pieces of hardware, and I would not be surprised if some of them use Debian-based OS distributions.

32-bit might not be, but i686 definitely is. Last pure i686 chips without MMX shipped sometime around 1998-1999

If I was a blackhat, I'd surely value all pre-IntelME / AMD PSP *retro-computing* hardware that is still capable of running more or less modern software without a built-in hardware backdoor higher than its weight in gold.

> targeting Pentium Pro (from 1995!).

BTW, today is Pentium Pro's 30 years anniversary.

>retro-computing hobby doesn't need the ability to run contemporary operating systems

why not? I still want to run modern software on older machines for security and feature reasons

Wow, those are exactly the same targets I use for releasing x86 and x64 (Windows) builds, but even I think it's a little over the top for Debian to support Pentium Pro.

We're really talking about alpha, hppa, m68k and sh4

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