Why discontinuing I386 support ?

[nemric]

Hie,

Just made update of my opnsense to 19.1.7 release and guess what ?

"And speaking of 20.1: This is the first of many reminders that 20.1 will discontinue the i386 (Intel 32 Bit) franchise as discussed a number of times within the community over the years. Our hope is that ARM64 will make a viable replacement. But that is for another time."

I went to Opnsense from Pfsense thanks to I386 support, my hardware is a low power MSI 9A19 with Atom N270 32 bit that works great and support will be discontinued in 6 months, I'm so disappointed ...

I don't understand that choice of dropping old hardware support ... Is their some hope for having a kind of LTS on 19.x.x version ?

[franco]

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=6884.msg30045#msg30045
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=6189.msg26009#msg26009
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=4780.msg19810#msg19810

And my personal favourite:

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=3101.0

It's time to do what we said we would do.


Cheers,
Franco

[nemric]

Yes I've found these posts ...

What about "LTS" on I386 ? At least for security updates ? thanks

[franco]

Given the desire in upstream software to discontinue i386 (go cross-build issues, postgres not working in plain generic i386 instruction set anymore, just two off the top of my head) I assume the image build will quickly degrade if not tended to. Ideally we want to focus efforts on replacements such as ARM64 instead.

We can't LTS our releases for another reason as well: FreeBSD ports quickly disintegrates for older versions no longer supported (that happened with our use of 11.1). Since we have to keep forward with 11.2 and 11.3 or 12.0 or 12.0 keeping i386 alive would mean maintaining it like we have done in the past years.


Cheers,
Franco

[nemric]

Thanks, well understood

Regards,
Nemric

[Exinus]

wow, i'm really sad to read about no more i386 support.

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=18227.msg82729#msg82729

Discontinuing i386 was, next to the bad sound in the forum, the main reason to migrate from pfSense to OPNsense. And I haven't regretted it yet, but i386 support is essential for me. There are a lot of 32 bit Hardware still in use. Now it seems OPNsense is making the same mistake. For me, discontinuing i386 support means migrating to RouterOS as a last resort  .

[franco]

You can find discussions about it as early as 2016. We have kept i386 alive for a long time because of existing hardware, but said hardware is now 15-20 years old and has paid for itself a number of times over if still operational and we simply need to move on.


Cheers,
Franco

[Exinus]

Nevertheless i386 hardware is still functional and sufficient in many areas. Replacing these just because of developer decisions would be absolutely inefficient.

[franco]

Excuse me, let me rephrase according to your response.

Nevertheless i386 build is still functional and sufficient in many areas. Not compiling it yourself just because of developer decisions would be absolutely inefficient.


Cheers,
Franco

[Exinus]

Is there a manual for OPNsense somewhere? I wouldn't have a problem with that, but diy i wouldn't be able to rule out compilation errors.

Nevertheless, many thanks to the OPNsense dev team for the good work. Even this decision now is probably a knockout criterion for further use for me.



Regards

[franco]

https://github.com/opnsense/tools#about-the-opnsense-tools

A VM setup of a FreeBSD 12.1 i386 would get you started. However, i386 is not being curated which means any changes in FreeBSD ecosystem we are not undoing anymore will have to be made manually from now on if it interferes with the i386 build in general, but this is limited to the ports tree work.


Cheers,
Franco

[marjohn56]

It's a bit like a few years back when the decision was made to turn off the analogue TV transmitters, lots of complaints about 'nothing wrong with our ten year old TV, still gets 5 channels'....

There are a lot of very cheap 64 bit devices either new or second hand that will do the job admirably. Not having to continue to support old 32 bit hardware will give the devs more time to work on current devices.

Time to move on....

[chemlud]

...I have here an 18-year-old Dell Precision i386 as a networking Swiss army knife running Debian stretch with a light-weight desktop, very snappy with just 2GB RAM.

Hardware deprecation is a shame (not so much for opensource projects with limited resources, but....). I will use my old i386 boxes until they diye, with old (yes, unsecure) OPNsense...

[marjohn56]

I think you mean die. 


Unless of course you were referring to changing their colour. 

[chemlud]

...they definitely change color before passing away ;-)