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)
The CADT model at it’s finest. It’s funny because Linux is considered the de facto choice for legacy hardware because it runs so well on it, or at least used to. The fact is the development model used by distros (and apparently also the Linux kernel as well) is absolutely awful, and it inevitably hurts movements that depend on it such as Permacomputing.
So it’s interesting reading all the folks talking about permacomputing and the like.
And I think there’s merit to keeping those architectures around.
But let’s turn this on its head, shall we? Where do we get the people who still have that hardware who are willing to actively take part in Linux kernel development?
Like, to become facile enough with the process, tools and codebase to be able to bear the load of writing new security patches as vulnerabilities are found?
It’s a hard problem. The number of people actively contributing to Linux is large in aggregate but VANISHINGLY small when it comes to any particular area of interest.
bad news for permacomputing folks
it can still be custom compiled in, right?
I don’t have a deep knowledge of the kernel to know if it’s as easy as simply adding in a separate module.
