Fedora 44 proposes dropping i686 support
The proposal has been officially withdrawn, citing that Fedora 44 targeting is too early.
Fedora 44, which will be released on March 31st, 2026, will mark the first Fedora Linux release without the i686 support, because this kind of support will be wiped entirely. This proposal says that the Fedora team proposes dropping the 32-bit multilib support and stopping package builds for the i686 architecture. The thread discussing the proposal can be found here.
Earlier, Fedora had stopped building installer and live images for the i686 architecture and for the package repositories, including the Linux kernel, starting from Fedora 31 released on October 8th, 2019. This proposal, if accepted, will be done in just two steps:
- Packages built for the i686 architecture are no longer included in x86_64 repositories (dropping “multilib” support, i.e. support for running 32-bit userspace on a 64-bit host).
- Packages are no longer built for the i686 architecture.
The first step will be done before the massive rebuild, and can be reversed easily if needed, since it doesn’t require retrying the bootstrap process for the reversal process. After the first step is done, the transition period will start with at least four weeks to complete the transition. During this period, packages will have to go through the adaptation process to make sure that they work correctly in the new configuration that doesn’t rely on the 32-bit multilib libraries. For example, Wine will have to enable the new WoW64 configuration.
The first step is planned to be implemented as early as possible during the Fedora 44 development cycle before the mass rebuild phase on January 14th, 2026. After that, the second step, which is irreversible, will be performed after the transition period finishes.
When this change is successfully implemented, any i686 packages will be removed upon performing the system upgrade to avoid any potential issues.
We will let you know once the FESCO approves or rejects the proposal.
#Fedora #Fedora44 #i686 #news #Tech #Technology #update