Will 32-bit continue to be supported in Mageia 8

[meurglys]

I'm wondering if 32-bit programs and install media will still be supported in the upcoming release Mageia 8? Are there any plans to phase it out?

[martinw]

There are no plans to phase it out yet.

It is getting increasingly difficult to support CPUs that don't implement the SSE2 instructions. Already in Mageia 7, Plasma and Qt-based applications may fail on such CPUs. There was discussion about changing our minimum CPU requirement to i686+SSE2, but no agreement was reached, so Mageia 8 will still support i586 as much as Mageia 7 does.

[wintpe]

re i686+SSE2
that pretty much excludes a significant bit of true 32 bit hardware.
only the 32 bit atoms, 32 bit pentium 4's, and some Sempron 3000+ in socket 754, and newer and Athlon XP-M
support i686+SSE2
excludes all of the athlon 32 (socket A) and pentiuim 3 and older processors.
of course its still useful on low specced 64 bit systems as well.
regards peter

[meurglys]

Thanks for replying back. Good to know.

[doktor5000]

support i686+SSE2
excludes all of the athlon 32 (socket A) and pentiuim 3 and older processors.

Well yes and no. The major problem is that more and more software requires SSE2, and there aren't many i586 CPU's that support SSE2,
so it makes more sense to make use of the better optimised compiler flags for i686 as the lowest common denominator.

Also it's not like we choose to exclude CPU's that don't support SSE2, but when many larger upstream projects require SSE2 support (e.g. Qt, Firefox, ...)
then we as a smaller distro with not a lot of active developers can't really afford to keep supporting non-SSE2 versions via custom patches.

And to be honest, if you try running a regular mainstream distro on anything that old, the better approach is to get some distro with a smaller footprint, IMHO.