Subject: bug#67535: Does anyone use i686-linux? [was Re: bug#67535: ci.guix.gnu.org 'Cannot allocate memory' while building for i686-linux]

From: André Batista <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2024 18:02:23 -0300

Hi!

seg 29 jul 2024 às 14:33:59 (1722274439), [email-masked] enviou:
> Efraim Flashner <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 02:51:49PM -0400, Leo Famulari wrote:
> >> For a long time we've not been able to build linux-libre on i686-linux
> >> because the source unpacking process runs out of memory.
> >
> > I believe if we limit the unpacking process to not more than 8 cores we
> > can avoid that problem.
> >
> >> I'm forwarding this bug to guix-devel to get more attention.
> >> 
> >> Is anybody actually using i686-linux anymore? Or should we begin to
> >> officially remove support for it?
> >
> > Keeping this to i686-linux specifically, what generation of hardware
> > supports i686 but not x86_64? Some (very) quick checking on wikipedia
> > suggests that the x60 from 2006 was either 32-bit or 64-bit, and I
> > believe there was an atom chip from 2015 that was 32-bit. Specifically,
> > that makes the newest hardware (at least from the CPU perspective) 10
> > years old at least.
> 
> FWIW, I'm using one of those Atom chips in a netbook for an installation
> of Sugar Desktop.  I upgrade it every few months or so.  If I'm the only
> user of i686-linux I would not want to condemn the project to supporting
> the architecture for my sake.

For the record, I'm another one still using those atom netbooks. Most
software that I use on that machine still builds and runs fine, with the
occasional hiccup.

But even though I use the arch, I also don't feel particularly inclined
to fix the occasional errors and can understand if people here decide to
drop support to it.