Fedora has officially announced on June 22, 2019 that they are dropping of the i686 kernel Support and i386/i686 Repositories starting from Fedora 31.
It was announced by Kevin Fenzi, he is working in Red Hat as the Fedora Infrastructure Lead.
So, it’s no longer possible to install Fedora 31 or later on i686 hardware, which will be released on October.
However, you can able to upgrade older releases as long as they are supporting a 32-bit repository. But the kernel version is still remain old possibly vulnerable kernel installed.
There is no standalone 32-bit packages will be built any more but multi-lib x86_64 repos not be affected and they will still built all packages for i686.
Now-a-days, very less users are using i686 architecture, It’s legacy hardware’s, which isn’t popular anymore and no manufacturers have produced any 32-bit computer hardware for desktop / laptop for last 10 years.
There are other distributions which already dropped the support for 32-bit. The details are listed below.
- Red Hat (RHEL) – It’s completely dropped 32-bit support since RHEL 7.
- Ubuntu – Ubuntu Officially Announced it’s Dropping Support for 32-bit Packages starting from Ubuntu 19.10.
- LinuxMint – It’s based on Ubuntu so, by default they are dropping off since Ubuntu doesn’t want to ship 32-bit in the future release.
- Fedora – Starting from Fedora 31
How Fedora is going to get Benefits in this?
users won’t try and upgrade old i686 installs with insecure kernels.
i686 users will not be able to upgrade, and will have to move to another supported arch.
compose times will be decreased (no more gathering i686 packages up and running createrepo on them).
Updates push times will be reduced.
disk size on mirrors will be reduced.
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