[lubuntu-users] Sunsetting i386

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 at 22:22, Aere Greenway <Aere at dvorak-keyboards.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/20/18 5:50 PM, Simon Quigley wrote:
>
> Full announcement is here: https://lubuntu.me/sunsetting-i386/
>
> The short version is that Lubuntu 19.04+ will no longer be released on
> the i386 architecture.
>
>
> I noticed in the link, that Lubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported until April 2011, which is 3 years (not 5).
>
> I dug into this discrepancy, and found the following:
>
> The 'main' archive of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Core. Ubuntu Studio 18.04 will be supported for 9 months. All other flavors will be supported for 3 years.
>
> This means that even though the main archive of 18.04 LTS is supported until April 2023, where Ubuntu has no i386 desktop support (and Lubuntu is apparently the only Ubuntu variant supporting i386 desktop), support of 32-bit desktop in Ubuntu will end in 2011, rather than the expected 2013.
>
> Please let me know if this is correct, or not.
>

Not sure what you mean at all. Your dates seem to be mostly in the
past =))))) i.e. "2011" and "2013" are long gone =))))
i386 is a supported port in 18.04 LTS and will remain so. In practice,
it means that products that drop i386 installer images, continue to
support upgrades but without addressing i386-specific issues, but e.g.
all security and SRU updates are built, tested and published on i386.
Most fixes and bugs are common code affecting all arches. And even
more explicitly in 18.04 on i386 we have Ubuntu Core & Cloud Images as
explicitly supported and everything that's needed to build them
(snapd, snaps, toolchain, kernel, base system, etc.).

As I have mentioned in the past, i386 is transitioning from a generic
platform to an embedded / IoT / use-case specific.

But at the same time, I wonder if Meltdown/Spectre has actually kind
of killed i386. Given that most recent generations of i386 chips are
affected, yet had no microcode updates developed for them.

My current assessment of the situation is that it is irresponsible to
run i386 kernel without microcode updates, specifically the security
mitigation against specter/meltdown aspect of it. However, I'm not
sure if I am out of date on this issue, given that maybe the in-kernel
mitigations have evolved by now to cover i386 too on par as amd64 with
microcode updates.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.