Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future
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The article title is “Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future” but according to the article Debian will drop i386 support because it will be dropped from the kernel. Seems like bad news for permacomputing folks.

(EDIT) modified the title since it seems more accurate to say that 32-bit support is being dropped. (reference)

  • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
    3·
    11 months ago

    No, that is not what it means. i386 is specifically the set of instructions that the 386 introduced. Later processors from intel added additional instructions, those were rolled into i686 as a set. i686 contains i386 so it can still run programs that target that, but a 386 can’t run a i686 program.

    i386 and i686 are both x86 32 bit instruction sets.

    What is happening is that the kernel will no longer support i386 as a target. So any processor that does not support at least i686 will stop working. This is basically anything before around a pentium 3 (iirc might be wrong about exact CPU.) Vista era computers should not be effected.

    The confusing part is that some distros have already dropped all 32bit for other reasons, but it would mean it would be hard for distros going forward to support 386 era processors.