On 15.12.20 01:55, Russ Allbery wrote: > Increasingly most of the people who work on Debian don't have i386 > hardware lying around, particularly i386 hardware that requires an i386 > kernel or that exercises the full range of older boot processes. If you > do, testing and reporting good bugs would probably be helpful.
FWIW, most people probably have amd64 hardware around, and can therefore use KVM-accelerated i386 emulation using QEMU. That emulation can be configured with a fine grain, down to CPU models/features. And until at least a few years ago, that emulation was quite realistic. For my bachelor's thesis, I looked into portability of binaries, and I used autopkgtest + QEMU to hunt for bugs where the buildd environment affected the build (for example, by picking up CPU flags of the buildd machine). I found #781998 like that (i386 binary assuming SSE is present), and confirmed it on real hardware. So, technically, I think i386 is quite easy to test. To me, even easier than arm64, where I need to get useful hardware first. Using QEMU, it's trivial to build packages for i386 on amd64 (using sbuild, or the qemu-sbuild-tools wrapper I'm dabbling on, which will be absorbed by sbuild soon), and autopkgtest using QEMU has been trivial since forever.
