Debian trixie for Kirkwood boxes

Is the curtain call for Debian armel coming?

Currently, there is Debian discussion going on about droping armel architecture altogether in trixie (Debian 13). armel includes Kirkwood, and many other old Marvell SoCs without floating point.

I hope it will be at least maintained in trixie and planned for obsolescence afterward. That will give us a few more years!

-bodhi
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/10/2023 03:23PM by bodhi.

Looking at some of the other legacy type hardware, maybe 32 bit i386 could share the same fate? Saw that the availability of hardware to grind out the code and test is becoming an issue as well as finding people interested in maintaining.

LeggoMyEggo,

> Looking at some of the other legacy type hardware,
> maybe 32 bit i386 could share the same fate? Saw
> that the availability of hardware to grind out the
> code and test is becoming an issue as well as
> finding people interested in maintaining.

I'm afraid so. Definitely 32 bit i386 is already on the way out. I think when things are running OK, old architectures are not a burden. Once there are some new problems, eg. kernel size, people will taking stock and look at the status of those boards in the market. Are they still being produced, how large is the installed user base....

Debian armel might survive a bit longer thanks to the old 32-bit rPi boards, they have a quite large user base.

-bodhi
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The support for the original i386 was dropped in Linux 3.8, more than 10 years ago. AFAIK the main problem with the i386 was a missing CMPXCHG opcode, which made it hard to maintain.