Installation Media and supportability of i386 in 18.04 LTS Re: Ubuntu Desktop on i386

[Seth Arnold]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 02:54:13PM +0100, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote:
> Let me resurrect this thread. In the context of what we should be
> doing in 18.04 and what to do between now and then.

Thanks for raising this again; it'd be nice to have a plan in place before
we wind up in a difficult situation.

> Here is an example draft plan to bikeshed over:
> 
> 16.10, 17.04, 17.10:
> * continue to provide i386 port to run legacy applications on amd64
> * continue to build i386 d-i / netboot installer
> * continue to build i386 kernel
> * continue to build i386 cloud-images
> * stop producing i386 ubuntu-desktop.iso
> * stop producing i386 ubuntu-server.iso

Note that at some point, we may need to stop supporting specific packages
on 32 bit systems. Some of our larger packages require modifications to
compile and link on 32 bit platforms and we're probably going to see one
or more of Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium browser, Libreoffice, etc., no
longer buildable on small-memory platforms.

We may need to abandon upstream packages along the way. (And some of these
huge packages are not practical for us to backport security fixes.) (See
also, precise's chromium-browser.)

> 18.04 LTS:
> * continue to provide i386 port to run legacy applications on amd64
> * stop producing i386 d-i / netboot installer
> * stop producing i386 kernel
> * stop producing i386 cloud-images
> * stop producing i386 ubuntu-desktop.iso
> * stop producing i386 ubuntu-server.iso
> 
> 18.10+:
> * Stop providing i386 port
> * Run legacy i386 only application in snaps / containers / virtual machines

I'm afraid this proposal may strand some current i386 users on a release
with no lifetime to it.

16.04's 32 bit support has a five-year lifespan. We may not be able to
support the whole thing for the full five years but it should mostly work.

But if we release 16.10, 17.04, 17.10 i386, we're basically encouraging
users to install them and upgrade them and then find out in mid-2018 that
they've reached the end of their OS life and no way back to the safety of
16.04 LTS.

I propose that 16.04 LTS should be the last release with i386 support.
That way we don't leave anyone with a choice of (a) keep running
known-insecure 17.10 in 2018 or (b) figure out how to do a downgrade
back to 16.04 LTS.

I'm not sure how we acheive this specific goal but I think we shouldn't
encourage i386 (or armhf?) users off of 16.04 LTS.

Thanks
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