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accruallast Saturday at 7:25 PM6 repliesview on HN

> i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.

Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!

OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.


Replies

zozbot234last Saturday at 7:29 PM

Hopefully i386 (or perhaps a new i386-like port with added support for 64-bit time values) can move to the unofficial Debian Ports infrastructure for Debian 14 (forky) or Debian 15 (duke). Debian Ports has a m68k port, so supporting one for i386 shouldn't be a huge problem.

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esaymlast Saturday at 8:41 PM

Are you confusing "386" with 32bit? 686 is the normal 32bit arch. 386 is something from the 1980's right?

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badsectoraculalast Saturday at 8:19 PM

AFAICT this refers to Debian support, the Linux kernel does support 32bit CPUs though only since the original Pentium (excluding some clones).

NewJazzlast Saturday at 7:40 PM

Well, isn't there an additional year or so of support for old stable? So beyond 2025.

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spauldolast Sunday at 9:30 AM

OpenBSD requires at least a Pentium these days.

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winridlast Sunday at 12:13 AM

Man, I thought I was behind using a P3 in like 2007 lol. You can get something 100x faster for $1 :D

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