Fedora Linux for a while already stopped building i686 kernel releases and dropped their dedicated i686 repositories while now for the Fedora 44 release there is a proposal to take things further: finish gutting the i686 support. The new change proposal seeks to no longer include packages built for the i686 architecture and thereby dropping multi-lib support for 32-bit packages on 64-bit hosts. There wouldn’t be any packages built any longer for i686 under this F44 proposal.
The Fedora 44 change proposal still needs to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but it would basically end x86 32-bit (i686) software support on Fedora Linux. In the x86 (x86_64) space most software is predominantly x86_64 already. The main exception comes down to Steam and some games still being x86 32-bit although there is the option of using Flatpak packages or similar containerized solutions for those needing i686 software/apps.
Doing away with the i686 architecture support in Fedora Linux is being promoted for decreasing the burden on package maintainers, release engineering, infrastructure, and users. The change proposal explains:
“Building and maintaining packages for i686 (and 32-bit architectures in general, but i686 is the last 32-bit architecture – partially – supported by Fedora) has been requiring more and more effort.
Many projects have already been officially dropping support for building and / or running on 32-bit architectures, requiring either adding back support for this architecture downstream in Fedora, or requiring packaging changes in a significant number of packages to adapt to this dropped support.
By dropping support for the i686 architecture entirely, this additional – and growing – maintenance burden is eliminated.
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No longer building packages for the i686 architecture frees up resources on x86 build machines that will instead be available to speed up x86_64 package builds.
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By dropping ~10000 32-bit packages from the x86_64 repositories, repository metadata will get smaller, which should speed up both metadata downloads and any dnf operations that involve dependency resolution.”
The change proposal was posted today to the Fedora devel list for further discussion before being voted on by FESCo.
Is it time for Fedora and other Linux distributions to end their i686 (x86 32-bit) software package support?
— Phoronix (@) June 24, 2025
Is it time for Fedora and other Linux distributions to do away with their i686 (x86 32-bit) software support?
Update: Originally this was listed as a Fedora 43 change proposal but now it’s been posted that the intent is on it being a Fedora 44 change.
