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by BonesJustice 2563 days ago
The headline makes it sound like they're dropping support for just the i386 architecture (as opposed to other x86 architectures, e.g., i686). The linked article makes it sound like they're dropping support for the 32-bit x86 platform entirely.

Are Ubuntu's 32-bit x86 packages limited to those targeting the i386 instruction set? As in, "we ship x64, or ancient i386, but nothing in between"?

Or do they use the i386 moniker used as an umbrella for all x86 architectures?
3 comments
matthewbauer 2563 days ago
This is very confusing, but is standard naming convention for Debian/Ubuntu. Basically i386 means x86_32 and amd64 means x86_64. Why they can't use the latter is beyond me. True i386 doesn't even work with recent Linux kernel and Glibc. i386 in Debian-speak is actually i686.
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acdha 2563 days ago
It makes more sense when you look at the history: i386 has been around for going on three decades and was originally the only x86 architecture. When the world started to go 64-bit, Intel was pushing Itanium as IA-64 as the top-performance option which could go head to head with high-end 64-bit RISC processors such as Alpha, PA-RISC, PowerPC, SPARC, etc. They attempted to rebrand x86 as IA-32 as a marketing exercise to match IA-64, both to demarcate it as the lesser architecture and to continue making the competing x86 vendors look less legitimate to business customers.

AMD was the first to develop and announce a 64-bit x86 extension back in 1999 and since they shipped the first hardware, the amd64 name distinguished it from Intel's IA-64. When Intel wrote off IA-64 and adopted AMD's extensions the “amd64” name was already used in a number of places.

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Phrodo_00 2563 days ago
amd64 does make sense because the distro will work in all amd64 computers (including EM64T stuff).

Calling i686 i386 doesn't, unless packages are actually compiled for i386 (which I don't think they are).

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Wowfunhappy 2563 days ago
The i386 moniker is used as an umbrella term for 32 bit x86 architectures.
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0x8BADF00D 2563 days ago
I would assume it’s x86 architectures, particularly those with a 32 bit processor word size.
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