Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 20, 2020 22:00 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Maybe the new x86 ABI could simply be "i686", killing a bunch of birds with one stone. Add time64 and make the baseline SSE2. Yes, that'd cut off Pentium 3 and below, but anyone still using those 10 years from now likely has needs a generic distro can't cover anyway. It's already happened in a few places - Debian won't install on an eee701 laptop without manual hacks, because it expects PAE support in the CPU.

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 21, 2020 3:44 UTC (Fri) by nivedita76 (subscriber, #121790) [Link] (4 responses)

i686 doesn't have SSE2?

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 21, 2020 5:16 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

That is known. However, i686 binaries do run on machines that do have SSE2. The suggestion is that we don't care enough about the ones that don't to bother with them, vs. a need to give up assuming that SSE2 ops work.

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 21, 2020 6:00 UTC (Fri) by felix.s (guest, #104710) [Link]

Then don’t call it ‘i686’.

Until somewhat recently, I used Debian on a machine without SSE2 support. I was quite dismayed that I couldn't run the Rust toolchain on it, even though the compiler target is called ‘i686’.

That the current Debian architecture targetting 32-bit x86 is called ‘i386’ (which currently is i686 in fact) at least has the excuse of maintaining continuity/compatibility. If you go as far with making a clean break to rename the whole architecture, at least don’t pick a misnomer.

Though it’s not like such haphazard removing support for older machines doesn’t make me nervous. I still run Debian on an old 32-bit laptop, though that one at least does support SSE2. I do keep wondering when I’ll be forced to drop it.

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 21, 2020 18:23 UTC (Fri) by nivedita76 (subscriber, #121790) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh? The suggestion was replacing i386 -> i686, no? Neither carries the implication that SSE2 is supported, so if you want to add that why not i386 -> pentium4?

Debian discusses how to handle 2038

Posted Feb 23, 2020 6:35 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The “scare quotes” in my post were deliberate, but perhaps not as obvious as they should've been.

Yes that's not what i686 means. But in practice, most other distros seem to take it to imply AMD64 sans Long Mode. If Debian wants to continue to support the subset of x86 CPUs that glibc still supports && have PSE-36 && lack SSE, then I won't stop them. (Things like Rust might, unfortunately, but that isn't an i386-only problem.)