Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

pcworld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 201 posts

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#41

Post by cannam »

akoster wrote: post #24

It is a shame that many major Linux distributions are dropping 32-bit x86 support. I used to be able to say with confidence that the old laptop or PC in your garage can run any major Linux distribution, breathing new life into aging hardware. For example, I have an old ThinkPad T42, which I use to test out new Linux distros, which incidentally, is currently running Arch. Using older hardware increases the chances tha…

> I have an old ThinkPad T42

I have a T40p running Arch which I still occasionally use, even for development, because it's just such a pleasing machine ergonomically. So I'm a bit concerned about this as well -- but then, I've been happily using Arch for years and it's not like I've ever contributed anything to the effort of maintaining it.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#42

Post by dfox »

Volundr wrote: post #32
jwilk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is not supported by Arch either.

What do you mean? The announcement specifically says multilib is unaffected. I run 32-bit programs all the time.

Multilib is different concept from x32 ABI. Typical usecase for multilib is running i386 binaries that use i386 ABI on amd64 system (or sun4m binaries on sun4u, mips32 on mips64...), x32 ABI is alternate ABI for amd64 that uses 32bit pointers, but all other amd64 ISA extensions.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#43

Post by peatmoss »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #33

FreeBSD did this too, right after I had just setup a local Minecraft server on an old Pentium D. It's a shame because it works perfectly for that purpose and now it'll just have to sit on FreeBSD 10 for the rest of it's life. I don't plan expose it to the outside world so that's OK for me, but surely 32-bit machines still have a purpose.

OpenBSD and NetBSD both support i386 if you're looking for a BSD option.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#44

Post by rolodato »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #33

FreeBSD did this too, right after I had just setup a local Minecraft server on an old Pentium D. It's a shame because it works perfectly for that purpose and now it'll just have to sit on FreeBSD 10 for the rest of it's life. I don't plan expose it to the outside world so that's OK for me, but surely 32-bit machines still have a purpose.

Pentium D does support x64 as far as I can tell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_D

> The Pentium D brand refers to two series of desktop dual-core 64-bit x86-64 microprocessors with the NetBurst microarchitecture, which is the dual-core variant of Pentium 4 "Prescott" manufactured by Intel.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#45

Post by StreakyCobra »

CJefferson wrote: post #18
StreakyCobra wrote: post #12

It is one of the reasons that makes me love Arch: developers are pragmatic. They were always in the early birds for taking decision about the future, like switching to Python3 as default interpreter system-wide, embracing the change to systemd, and now this. The rolling release aspect imposes to stay as close as possible to upstream versions because upstream does not wait on Arch to update their dependencies to newer…

The switch to the 'python' command running python 3, as a non-arch user, put me off Arch forever. It just broke everything, which had long assumed 'python' would run python 2. Not installing python 2, and just python 3, with the name python3, would have been fine. Arch put us in a situation where it was basically impossible to run python 2 with a #! line, as some distros hadn't yet introduced a 'python2' symlink yet.

So to avoid re-opening the debate of Python 2 vs Python 3, let's take this point of view: The Python 3 language may, or may not, have been an improvement, and the transition from 2 to 3 may, or may not, have been done correctly. Everyone has its own opinion on this. But at the end this problem concerns the Python community.

From the Arch developers point of view, the Python developers decided to release a new version of their language. They were going to support python 2 for a while, but the direction that the language was taking for the future was Python 3, so one day or another Python 3 would become the standard, so doing the switch was the good decision.

As said by @tbranyen the work of adapting shebangs have been done on the Arch side anyway, so I don't see a problem for people developing their projects in Python. Also Arch users are mostly power users (you need to understand quite a bit about linux to install it) so they are usually able to handle python 2 vs 3 errors quite well, especially as it is known than Arch use Python 3 by default.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#46

Post by swiley »

akoster wrote: post #24

It is a shame that many major Linux distributions are dropping 32-bit x86 support. I used to be able to say with confidence that the old laptop or PC in your garage can run any major Linux distribution, breathing new life into aging hardware. For example, I have an old ThinkPad T42, which I use to test out new Linux distros, which incidentally, is currently running Arch. Using older hardware increases the chances tha…

It's increadibly easy (although the computer will spend hours crunching) to make a boot disk for pretty much anything using buildroot. That honestly sounds like a better plan for underpowered hardware than expecting a major distro to support it.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#47

Post by yAnonymous »

morganvachon wrote: post #39
yAnonymous wrote: post #30

Reposted with added "upstart" so Arch fanboys can't nitpick their way out of this.

> stuck to SysVinit and told users "you want Systemd, make a package" until long after the big distros had made the switch Bullshit, Arch was one of the first to switch to systemd as the default way back in 2012. The only "big distros" that switched before Arch were Fedora (obviously since that's where it came from), Mageia which is based on Fedora, and OpenSUSE (but not SLES). The next distro to switch was CoreOS a…

Ubuntu and RHEL had Upstart for years before Arch made the switch to Systemd. SUSE beat them to it, too.

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

New init systems were widely used long before Arch officially implemented them. Talking about facts, yours seem to be "alternate facts".

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#48

Post by km3k »

sevensor wrote: post #38
DanBC wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Side effect will be that people will be encouraged to get a modern computer if not already. All those netbooks (atom processors; 1 GB or 2 GB ram; 32 GB hard drive) would be great with Linux (once the drivers get fixed) and really benefit from 32 bit because of the ram limitations. Now? They'll end up in landfill.

I run Arch on most everything -- up to now it's worked great on old hardware as long as I'm judicious about what I install. When they stop updating 32bit, I suppose I'll switch to Tiny Core. Or rather, well after they stop updating 32bit and Tiny Core catches up.

Good point about other distros catching up. Arch will be updating 32-bit until at least November and it could be another year or more until others like Tiny Core or Debian catch up to the package versions that Arch left off with. Will that now 8+ year old hardware still be worth using enough to switch distros when it is 10+ years old?

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#49

Post by gsnedders »

Koshkin wrote: post #21

Good for Arch, I guess. Still, there's plenty of uses for 32-bit platforms. Also, much of the attractiveness of Linux (the kernel) and the GNU software has always been in their excellent support for various architectures and platforms. Incidentally, wouldn't the exclusive use of 64-bit pointers (and size_t) prompted by the inflated need in large address spaces lead to an ever more increasing demand for memory (due to…

> Incidentally, wouldn't the exclusive use of 64-bit pointers (and size_t) prompted by the inflated need in large address spaces lead to an ever more increasing demand for memory (due to in-memory objects being now bigger in size)?

Yes. This is the reason why some people have pushed for "x32" support, and why Linux 3.4 and above supports it (tl;dr: x64-64, but with 32-bit pointers: you get all the advantages of x86-64 without the pointer bloat).

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#50

Post by km3k »

jonathonf wrote: post #34
StreakyCobra wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other distributions better suited (even specialized) to be run on old hardware.

Which ones provide a similar approach to Arch? A six-year-old 32-bit processor (e.g. an Atom in an EeePC 901 or HP Mini 311c) is more than capable of running a modern desktop system.

FYI It's actually 8 years old for the EeePC 901 and the last 32-bit Atoms came out in 2009.
Post reply on HN