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Dev1User

Member

Registered: 2022-05-16

Posts: 18  

Upgrade from Devuan Daedalus 32-bit to Excalibur

Hello!

I was just about to upgrade my current 32-bit Daedalus system to Excalibur. While reading through the release notes, I came across the following problem.

It says:

Reduced support for i386

## Getting Devuan 6 Excalibur

Devuan 6 Excalibur is available for i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, ppc64el and
riscv64 architectures. However, the i386 packages don't include a linux-image. See
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ … t-for-i386
for details.

Then I clicked on the link and it says the following:

5.1.2. Reduced support for i386

From trixie, i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. Fewer packages are available for i386 because many projects no longer support it. The architecture’s sole remaining purpose is to support running legacy code, for example, by way of multiarch or a chroot on a 64-bit (amd64) system.

The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Its instruction set requirements include SSE2 support, so it will not run successfully on most of the 32-bit CPU types that were supported by Debian 12.

Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware. Cross-grading without a reinstall is a technically possible, but risky, alternative.

Now I'm wondering if I should even bother with an upgrade if it's hardly supported, or not supported at all? And whether the system will still run smoothly after the upgrade?

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,346  

Re: Upgrade from Devuan Daedalus 32-bit to Excalibur

There won't be any more kernels for i386. Debian decision with consequences for Devuan. You may look around for other distros.

There is at least one thread in this forum about this topic: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7124 and I think there was another one.

Dev1User

Member

Registered: 2022-05-16

Posts: 18  

Re: Upgrade from Devuan Daedalus 32-bit to Excalibur

But what's strange is the following:

The release notes state:

## Getting Devuan 6 Excalibur

Devuan 6 Excalibur is available for i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, ppc64el and riscv64 architectures. However, the i386 packages do not include a linux-image. See https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ … t-for-i386 for details.

When I go to install Excalibur on Devuan, it says: Supported architectures: amd64.

And Excalibur is based on Trixie from Debian. Trixie Debian no longer supports 32-bit architectures. So why does Devuan then state that Excalibur is available for i386?

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,741  

Re: Upgrade from Devuan Daedalus 32-bit to Excalibur

Next paragraph in the release notes starts with:

Installer isos and live CDs for amd64 are available for download

And this section:

### Reduced support for i386

There is no i386 installer iso for Devuan 6 Excalibur, following Debian's
choice to remove their official i386 kernel and installer.

And if you look at the debian release notes it explains that you can run 32-bit in chroot or container.

I believe it's still possible to upgrade a 32-bit system. You won't get a new kernel, so if you have the kernel metapackage linux-image-686-pae you might need to remove it first. I'm not sure about that.

You can use a linux-libre kernel if you don't need proprietary (non-free) firmware.
see: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7208

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,741  

Re: Upgrade from Devuan Daedalus 32-bit to Excalibur

I can now say that it's still possible to upgrade 32-bit daedalus to excalibur. I just did it.

I removed the kernel metapackage (linux-image-686-pae) and installed usrmerge.
Changed sources.list from daedalus to excalibur.
Installed linux-libre kernel 6.12.57-gnu
Ran apt update, apt upgrade, reboot, apt dist-upgrade, apt autoremove.
done
Rebooted again just to be sure.