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Fierelier

Member

Registered: 2023-01-24

Posts: 6  

[SOLVED] How will the deprecation of Debian's i386 affect Devuan?

As spoken about in this thread, Debian seems to be looking to discontinue support for x86 machines. I find this choice somewhat questionable, since these machines are quite capable still, in my eyes. I could daily drive my Pentium M 1.2GHz if I needed to, and I have sometimes used that machine for extensive periods of time, exclusively.

...yet, I'm close to giving up on this platform, I feel like the walls have been moving in for a long time:
* Many distros are discontinuing x86
* Browsers are all f*cked-up (in general), and ignore my build preferences in some cases, failing to compile without SSE2/SSE3
* Clang and Rust use the wrong definitions for i686, breaking some software on non-SSE2 capable machines. No desire from these teams to fix
* Software is generally getting worse, with people just jumping on whatever new *shiny* things come out (GTK3/GTK4 are mostly pointless, slow and buggy, yet everyone adapts them)
* It's difficult to run older software on Linux. I'm trying to develop software to resolve this, but right now, things really still feel disconnected between the old and new software spheres

An old x86 laptop is what truly got me into Linux in the first place. I've been working on debloating my entire suite of software, crafting replacements with the limited inspiration I have, for things that I don't consider good. But it really feels like things are coming to an end, this time.

I assume Devuan will adapt Debian's upstream behavior of i386, and also drop it eventually. But I'm still curious to hear, what is the official stance on this?

Last edited by Fierelier (2024-01-15 09:52:34)

hendrikboom3

Member

Registered: 2024-01-08

Posts: 7  

Re: [SOLVED] How will the deprecation of Debian's i386 affect Devuan?

I am still actively using a 32-bit intel laptop.  It's running my stopgap server.  The one this thread was originally about.  It's an ASUS netbook from 2008 -- the first one that required no proprietary drivers.

I wonder sometimes if I have the machine correctly configured, but intead might it be too slow to respond to the DNS requests for it to be regarded as authoritative.  Is this remotely plausible?

It takes me about 20 seconds of wait time to connect to it using
    ssh topoi.pooq.com
That's 20 real-time seconds to get to the shell prompt.  Ten seconds before get to enter a password, and after that another ten seconds to get to the shell prompt.

-- hendrik

Fierelier

Member

Registered: 2023-01-24

Posts: 6  

Re: [SOLVED] How will the deprecation of Debian's i386 affect Devuan?

I've had a Pi 1 as a server for a while, that's quite a slow device, surely slower than even your netbook, and I didn't experience that.

I don't think your theory is correct. As far as I know, your server doesn't interact at all with the DNS, when there is a connection incoming. The client contacts the DNS, gets the IP, and then connects to your server using that IP. I don't think the domain even needs to point to a valid IP at all, for the DNS to route clients there. I am by no means an expert when it comes to these things, though.

Might be worth to bring up a htop instance, while connecting to it, to see if it's bottlenecking anywhere. When I do ssh topoi.pooq.com -v, I see your server is slow to process each step, for some reason. Could be full RAM? Really not sure. I've had a Pentium III 700mhz with 256MB of RAM react faster to SSH requests.

Last edited by Fierelier (2024-01-15 17:31:13)

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,486  

Re: [SOLVED] How will the deprecation of Debian's i386 affect Devuan?

Hendrick, I don't get any delays when I ssh into my Asus netbook. If you want to try the same system I'm running, here's a live-iso I made for my EEE. Passwords are root:root and user:user and you'll need to use startx to get a desktop.
https://get.refracta.org/files/experime … 5_1348.iso

GlennW

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2019-07-18

Posts: 644  

Re: [SOLVED] How will the deprecation of Debian's i386 affect Devuan?

first impact I thought of it Gaming apps like Steam rely on 32bit arch.

---

pic from 1993, new guitar day.

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,251  

Re: [SOLVED] How will the deprecation of Debian's i386 affect Devuan?

@Fierelier: yes, the Devuan repository is an "on-the-fly merge" of Debian packages that uses the packages directly from Debian repositories (except for the "forked" packages). I.e., Devuan only maintains and builds forked packages, and relies on Debian doing that for the rest.

In essence Devuan is simply a re-indexing of which packages are included and where to download them; forked packages from Devuan and all other packages from Debian. Thus, if Debian stops maintaining and building i386 packages, Devuan will follow.

Fierelier

Member

Registered: 2023-01-24

Posts: 6  

Re: [SOLVED] How will the deprecation of Debian's i386 affect Devuan?

Alright, thank you!