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List:       ubuntu-devel-discuss
Subject:    Re: Proposal: Let's drop i386
From:       "Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult" <info () metux ! net>
Date:       2018-05-13 20:32:23
Message-ID: 74a4d034-5acd-897d-9626-0c839ec2be48 () metux ! net
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On 12.05.2018 18:40, Tobin Davis wrote:

> I work with FPGA accelerators, both at Intel and for a 
> startup.  A majority of the tools we use (Quartus, Modelsim in 
> particular) only support 32bit (and very old at that).  The companies 
> developing these tools are all too happy to ONLY support Redhat 
> Enterprise 6 (and barely RHEL 7), and so far refuse to budge.

There're many more of those examples out there in the wild.

Sad enough that we depend on such commercial crap that's even hard to
deploy (several weeks ago I had the unpleasant job of building fully
automatic deployment - burned quite some time to figure out a proper
way, write expect scripts, etc) - but the dependencies to 32bit libs
(even though it is supposed to run on 64bit - the installer is 64bit!),
makes that even much uglier.

> A wide 
> variety of our customer base prefer Ubuntu and have their infrastructure 
> geared towards this, so I have had to be very creative in getting 
> everything working for them (adding 32bit support, swapping out the 
> linker that ships with these tools, etc). If Ubuntu drops i386 all 
> together, this can have a major impact on the whole FPGAaaS model.

Let's share our stuff. I still got some ansible scripts flying around.

> Outside of that, I also have a large collection of older software (games 
> mainly) that are still fun, but also 32bit only.  Dropping i386 would 
> render them entirely useless, or force people away from Ubuntu.

Yep. For compatibility, we really need 32bit libs.
But I can live w/ a small chroot system for that.

OTOH, I'm running several 32bit systems on 64bit kernels, some for
historical reasons, but also saving resources.

> This leaves image and installer testing.  My vote is 
> to drop the images (except core as it is very useful for embedded 
> projects which Intel still sells 32bit only chips for IoT.  This at 
> least keeps Ubuntu as a prime development environment for these devices.

Please also keep a minimal installer.


--mtx

-- 
Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info@metux.net -- +49-151-27565287

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