On 07/12/2017 06:09 AM, Hans de Goede wrote:
I still have (some) 32 bit hardware in use and I must say that I was
not aware of this zombie state. i686 kernels have been working fine for
me otherwise I would have likely stepped up to fix things (or if that
was too much work replace my last 32bit hardware), but I may just have
been lucky and never hit a bad kernel.
I help out a small school with all tech related issues. They were
donated a pile of (I think) Pentium D desktops from another school that
was upgrading theirs. I set up a computer lab for them running Fedora
with a lighter WM and it's been working great. When I saw that mailing
list post a while back, I took one of the computers home with me for
testing purposes, but from my view so far, there has never been an issue
with the 32-bit kernel or userspace that has needed investigation. More
recently, we received some similar computers with Pentium 4 CPUs that we
are using now. I upgraded them all to 2GB of RAM and they work fine for
web browsing, LibreOffice, gcompris, etc.
Of course now that I checked the CPU flags, this whole email is
irrelevant. Besides supporting SSE2 (which is what I was looking for),
I just noticed they also have the x86-64 flag... I guess if this change
goes through I will be looking into how to run a 64-bit kernel and
32-bit userspace. We also still have a few laptops that are running
32-bit Fedora, but they don't have to and they will all be retired
within a year anyway.
As an aside, I also have a wall-embedded touchscreen Geode computer, but
it stopped being able to run Fedora a long time ago. I now have a
buildroot system on it with the minimum to run an X server and remote
display the app.