I guess the question is: how many pre-P2 machines are out there running Debian and needing the latest version, and does that seem worth the effort. But it seems as though Debian will still run on older hardware that Windows 8 and onwards?

Still a shame though.

I suppose in a few years from now, they'll remove support for 32-bit x86 altogether (there's only the PIII, early P4s and Athlon XPs left, before things went 64-bit).
That would REALLY be the end of an era.

Dropping support for x86 seems like a stupid idea even years from now. What about all the proprietary software that depends on x86 and multiarch\multilib?

They might drop the x86 install media, but I doubt they'd drop the architecture entirely in the foreseeable future.

Bit foolish to be honest, rules out embedded systems that are still running fast 486 or pentium era hardware. They'll have to use a fork or different distribution instead.

Recently got bitten by this installing OpenBSD on my retro system, using it for sniffing packets, and finding that wireshark now defaults to a rather heavy qt based interface, and that (at the time) it required SSE instructions (a mistake, now fixed by the team).

DracoNihil wrote:

Dropping support for x86 seems like a stupid idea even years from now. What about all the proprietary software that depends on x86 and multiarch\multilib?

I thought proprietary software was shunned in the linux community? It seems that most people don't even run the binary video drivers from AMD/nVidia, despite these drivers having many advantages over the open source ones.

ynari wrote:

Recently got bitten by this installing OpenBSD on my retro system, using it for sniffing packets, and finding that wireshark now defaults to a rather heavy qt based interface, and that (at the time) it required SSE instructions (a mistake, now fixed by the team).

Yea, I still compile the x86-build of my Direct3D code without SSE. That way my Direct3D9 stuff can run on a wide variety of older hardware, such as Pentium IIs and Athlons, and any 3d accelerator with support for DX7 or higher (think GeForce256, original Radeon, Matrox G400 and such).
(I am talking about 'production code', as in an application that I am currently selling online).

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Scali wrote:

despite these drivers having many advantages over the open source ones.

id love to read more on that, to my knowledge(and experience) open ati>>>all

mrau wrote:

Scali wrote:

despite these drivers having many advantages over the open source ones.

id love to read more on that, to my knowledge(and experience) open ati>>>all

Why would they even bother to release closed-source drivers if the open source ones give you everything you need?
Open source drivers lack various functionality, don't deliver the same level of performance, and generally you don't get support for the latest GPUs.
Eg: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article … -157-open&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article … en-ubuntu&num=1

Intel is the only one doing open source drivers right: They don't have separate closed-source and open-source drivers. Their driver team just develops on one codebase, which is open.
For the others, I don't see why people would even bother with the open source ones.
AMD just gives some 'token' source code and docs every now and then, but doesn't focus entirely on open source. Closed-source is where things happen.
And nVidia doesn't bother with open source at all, Nouveau is an unsupported independent project, where people try to do the best they can with the limited information they can get about nVidia hardware. That's just never going to work, especially when your competition is nVidia, with the best driver team in the industry.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Why would any modernday os still support such old hardware is beyond me.
I can see it if it's a nich OS just for old stuff, but it just seems like a waist of time to me for something modern.

You have an embedded system, i.e. a firewall, that has been doing its job happily for years. It will continue being able to do this forever, because the bandwidth it can handle will remain the same for the foreseeable future (let's say up to 100Mb Internet is a pipe dream in its location).

However, it still needs to remain secure, and operating systems are only supported with fixes for a limited amount of time. After that time they need to be upgraded.

486's stopped production sometime in 2007 as they still had a major use in embedded systems. I still wonder if this choice Debian is making is due to GCC regressions or something.

I wonder, is the lower limit for i686 anyhow related to it's ability to do 36 bit adressing ?
That's the only interesting feature, I can think of and the i586 can't do that.

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Why do you think Centos would be better for an embedded application?