Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
pcworld.com
Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
1–10 of 201 posts
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#2Will be interesting if a part of the community "forks" arch like they did for 16bit back then. However lowarch is apparently also dead by now: http://www.lowarch.org/
I still have that installed on a i386 machine, but not booted since years.
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#3Other tech folk have always talked about 32 bit support as a necessary evil since smaller types mean less memory.
The complexity of managing a secondary 32 bit environment has been worse than the memory usage of 64 bit apps for a very, very long time.
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#4Other tech folk have always talked about 32 bit support as a necessary evil since smaller types mean less memory. The complexity of managing a secondary 32 bit environment has been worse than the memory usage of 64 bit apps for a very, very long time.
If people want 32 bit pointers on 64 bit hardware they should pick the x32 ABI instead
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#5Other tech folk have always talked about 32 bit support as a necessary evil since smaller types mean less memory. The complexity of managing a secondary 32 bit environment has been worse than the memory usage of 64 bit apps for a very, very long time.
That need has been met by the x32 ABI for some time now, it combines some of the best parts of the x86_64 arch with the lower memory consumption of 32bit (still limited to 4gb max memory though)
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#6they did not mention anything about Arch on 32-bit ARM. Still plenty of devices in the wild
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#7they did not mention anything about Arch on 32-bit ARM. Still plenty of devices in the wild
Arch Linux ARM is a separate project to Arch Linux.
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#8they did not mention anything about Arch on 32-bit ARM. Still plenty of devices in the wild
The ARM ports have never been "official" ports of Arch Linux. This announcement is about dropping one of the official ports, the 32-bit-only version.
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#9Will be interesting if a part of the community "forks" arch like they did for 16bit back then. However lowarch is apparently also dead by now: http://www.lowarch.org/ I still have that installed on a i386 machine, but not booted since years.
> I still have that installed on a i386 machine, but not booted since years.
Did it even work usefully? While Linux itself retains backwards compatible drivers for a long time, X.org and others aren't quite as diligent.
E.g., five years ago I could not run any up to date distribution on Pentium 4 era notebooks with anything more than unaccelerated VESA framebuffers, because there were no compatible drivers for their integrated graphics card any more. (At the same time, we still had Pentium 4 servers in production use!)
Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit
#10One thing that concerns me is packaging desktop virtual machine images for easy reproducibility.
We realized that some users do not (or cannot, due to security policies) turn on VT-x/AMD-V in their machines, and therefore Virtualbox and VMWare Player cannot run 64-bit guests.
So we had to make 32-bit virtual machine images for them. If popular distros stop supporting 32-bit, we will have a harder time packaging such images, since we'll have to use a different distro for them, with different package names, settings, etc.