On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 3:43 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:26:03PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> I ran into this unannounced change:
>
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Stop_Building_i686_Kernels
> If this is accepted, all x86 hardware on which Fedora can run will
> support SSE2, and we should reflect that in the i686 build flags.
> How likely is it that this proposal is accepted? Ideally, we would know
> this before the mass rebuild so that we can change the compiler flags in
> redhat-rpm-config.
Currently i686 users are at about 1/6th of x86_64 users, by mirror
checkins. I don't have an easy way of knowing how many of those i686
checkins are old releases -- I'll need to ask Smooge to make a custom
report -- but I think it's fair to guess that it's significantly tilted
that way. So, taking a SWAG, I'd say maybe 10% of our users would be
impacted. That's pretty big, but on the other hand if the cost is
disproportionate -- and having heard from the kernel people about this
for several years, I think it might be -- it's probably something we
should do anyway.
The kernel team quit "supporting" i686 several releases ago, it is
down to community support, which is pretty much nonexistent. Sure,
people file bugs, but rarely do people point to or supply patches for
those bugs. The biggest issue is how much it is ignored by upstream
as well. We have issues where things were never tested on i686, and
then have to be fixed before we can release necessary and relevant
updates which impact everyone else. And discontinuing the i686 build
for F27 would still mean over a year left of supported Fedora on i686
hardware.
When looking at those check ins, it would also be interesting to note
which of those are running on virt or containers. Containers would
still be possible, and 32bit userspace in virt guests with a 64bit
kernel would still be possible. The kernel header package would still
be built, so all other 32bit i686 packages would continue to build and
work just fine.
Justin