End of 32-bit support?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 06:00:28PM +0100, poma wrote:
> On 28.01.2015 17:17, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 08:37:59AM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> >>> Hatters, or from Red Hatters working in their spare time. (Of course,
> >>> as RH often does, many of the high-output contributors end up applying
> >>> for and getting RH jobs, skewing the picture.)
> >> Well, I am observing quite a few people from major enterprises (RH
> >> business partners?) who are working on secondary archtectures, but
> >> I've very rarely (I don't recall any such incident) tripped over
> >> community folks who are working on them.
> > 
> > Sometimes Red Hat business partners, but that doesn't mean that it's at
> > Red Hat's direction. Overall, this is one of the few areas where we
> > have money and paid effort flowing into the project that *isn't* coming
> > from Red Hat, and I don't think that's a bad thing. These are
> > "community folks" too, at least if we're doing it right.
> > 
> >>> Additionally, I'm not privy to Red Hat's architecture strategy, but as
> >>> far as I know, 32 bit ARM — currently our only primary non-x86 arch! — is
> >>> not of particular corporate interest.
> >> It's obvious to me the aarch64 is RH's business interest.
> > 
> > But aarch64 and 32-bit arm are _completely_ different architectures.
> > 
> > 
> >>> I also think it's a little unfair to frame this as a conflict, overall.
> >>> It may be the case that Red Hat is less interested in paying people to
> >>> work on 32-bit x86 (although I don't actually know that to be a fact).
> >>> But this is just like any other contributor to the community — you
> >>> can't make people do work they're not interested in.
> >> Right, but that's not my point:
> >> My points are:
> >> - I once more feel pushed/tossed around by RH's interest and
> >> RH-Fedora-people who obviously don't properly separate RH and
> >> Community.
> > 
> > I can't argue with feelings, but I also am not really sure what
> > separation you're looking for here and how it would affect this.
> > 
> >> - Support for i386 falls out as a by-product at almost Zero-costs of
> >> the existing process.
> > 
> > I don't think that's true at all. It signficantly increases QA load,
> > and we're struggling a lot with release engineering being able to cope
> > with Fedora at its current scale. Cutting back here has an clear
> > benefit (whether or not it's significant enough to outweigh the other
> > wide isn't settled, of course). More significantly, the Fedora kernel
> > team tells me that _they_ don't feel like they have the resources to
> > really honestly support the 32-bit kernel — and the rest all falls out
> > from that.
> > 
> 
> You write as if you - Fedora/Red Hat lack people capable of
> maintaining the kernel as if it were something special - they are
> not kernel developers.  What Josh works except to maintains the
> kernel?

I can't parse this last sentence correctly.  Are you asking what Josh
does other than maintain the kernel?  Or are you asking something else?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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