Moving 32 bits to Tier 2

Following others, FreeBSD is turning i386 into a second class citizen, https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2021-January/002006.html

rvp

pin I would shed a tear--except that all 3 of my 32-bit x86 boxes are dead: 386 box - untouched for 20+ years; AMD K6 box - CPU dead; AMD Athlon box - MB dead -- capacitors failed.

JuvenalUrbino

pin They did the same to sparc64 on 12.x, then decided to eventually drop SPARC support in the upcoming 13-RELEASE

nia

Specifically, we expect that time_t will remain 32 bits on i386.

Best time to double its size would have been 10+ years ago

nia True, keeping time_t as such is non-sense.

musl has shift to 64 sometime ago

musl 1.2 is now available and changes time_t for 32-bit archs to a 64-bit type.

So has Alpine.
It irritates me that Void hasn't done it yet. I run x86_64 but, it bothers me because

SECURITY ADVISORY: All releases through 1.2.1 are affected by CVE-2020-28928 and should be patched or upgraded to 1.2.2.

*Above quotes from, https://musl.libc.org/

nia

I guess the problem with the 2038 hard limit is that there's genuinely a lot of very good 32-bit x86 hardware that will stay working into the far future. I know people that swear by Panasonic Toughbooks and use them daily, and that hardware isn't going to die any time soon - same with industrial PCs, PC Engines, and Soekris boards. I'm against electronic waste, if it works and is efficient it should stay working.

The way NetBSD chose to do 64-bit time_t is probably weird. OpenBSD later did it by breaking ABI, but NetBSD did it by versioning system calls. The old 32-bit time_t system calls still exist and will be used if you run a binary that was built before the switch, on the whole making the switch painless.

nia OpenBSD later did it by breaking ABI, but NetBSD did it by versioning system calls.

Void is a rolling release and binary packaging on Linux should be much simpler to handle. The problem is that xbps can't handle reinstalling all the packages without a version bump, which would require all packages in the repository to be re-built.

I know it sounds strange, as this what we do all the time on bulk-builds but, this is not the way Linux people are used to do things. Even though, Void was created by a ex-NetBSD person and, probably because of this the package manager doesn't know how to handle the situation.