Arch Linux

Tom B

Member

Registered: 2014-01-15

Posts: 187

Website

No more 32bit - Any indication of what we should expect in the future?

I maintain several Arch Linux Virtual Machines for providing packaged VMs to university students I teach. Roughly 10% of students run machines either without VT-x enabled or older CPUs (certain 'pentium' and 'celeron' cpus) that cannot run 64bit VMs at all. As such, I provide a 32 bit image as an alternative. On Vagrant's Atlas service, I have 10% as many downloads for the 32 bit version as the 64 bit version and the only way they would find the 32bit image is if they had problems with the 64bit one.

I'd rather not spend valuable class time getting students to reboot into bioses (and figuring out how to do so, UEFI complicates this further) then waiting for inevitable windows updates so just get students to download the 32bit image if the 64bit machine doesn't work. And there are a small percentage of students who have laptops that don't support VT-x at all so cannot run 64bit VMs.

I like using arch because it's minimal and easy to customize with the software I need to provide the students but without 32 bit support I'd really need to move to a different distro. Moving forward, what will 32 bit look like on Arch? Even if Arch provided official Kernel, Systemd and Pacman binaries (along with any dependencies these had) it would be easy enough to write PKGBUILDs to compile the various software I need but without the base packages I can see this being a bit of a pain and would likely just move everything to a different distro. After November what can I expect to see in regards to 32 bit packages?

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,355

Re: No more 32bit - Any indication of what we should expect in the future?

After November what can I expect to see in regards to 32 bit packages?

Likely all dropped, as there was almost no interest in maintaining a solution going forward. A few spoke up and said they had a machine or two which could not do the 64-bit transition, but always with the additional note that those were low-usage machines or would just be switched to another distro.

Basically there's much (IMO) less interest in 32-bit than ARM at this point.

That being said the build scripts still work (and will continue to) so if this is really important to some it should not be too hard to do what the ALARM team already do, maintaining what's effectively a 32-bit fork of Arch.

For more clarity do check out the mailing list thread on this issue.

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