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Any good reasons we should keep i586-virt image?

Daniil Baturin
Posted 10 Feb, 2015

Right now we build three image flavours: amd64, i586, and i586-virt. Both flavour set and naming create some confusion occasionally. If there’s i586-virt, why not amd64-virt? Is i586-virt suitable for physical machines? Is amd64 suitable for virtual machines? Experienced users know the answer, and we have it documented, but self-descriptive naming would be nice I guess.

Besides, additional flavours increase developers workload (more things to test) and mirror space requirements, so it would be nice to have as much unification as possible.

Before 1.1.0 release I proposed to drop the non-virt i586 flavour, but people reminded me that older machines and small embedded boards still use non-PAE CPUs, while i586-virt is built with PAE because some virtualization guest support features depend on it, and this step would make VyOS unusable on those machines.

So, two questions. First, are there any situations when i586-virt image cannot be replaced with amd64 one? Second, what would be the best naming?

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