Validity of i686 as a release blocker

Hello, Over the past week, we've been dealing with a kernel bug[1] that prevents i686 machines from booting. Help was requested and given, and it has been excellent and most welcome. This email has no reflection on that, and is instead focused on the reality of where i686 stands today. In February[2] we sent out an email highlighting that the kernel team was not going to treat i686 bugs as a priority. Since that time, we have held true to our word and have not focused on fixing i686 bugs at all. It seems that the wider community is also treating i686 similarly. The kernel bug that was made automatic blocker because of existing criteria was present in Fedora since the 4.1-rc6 kernel, which was released May 31. It has been in every boot.iso created since that date. Not a single person reported this issue until last week. That is a timespan of two months. The kernel team has autotesting for i686 kernels, but the environment there does not utilize boot.iso so it did not detect this. The QA team has automated testing for some of this, but nothing for the i686 architecture at all. It is not a priority there either. Perhaps it is time that we evaluate where i686 stands in Fedora more closely. For a starting suggestion, I would recommend that we do not treat it as a release blocking architecture. This is not the same as demotion to secondary architecture status. That has broader implications in both buildsys and ecosystem. My suggestion is narrowly focused so that builds still proceed as today, but if there is something broken for i686 it does not block the release of whatever milestone we are pursuing. (To be clear, I would support a move to secondary arch status for i686, but I am not suggesting it at this time.) Making i686 non-release blocking would actually match reality. None of the Fedora Editions appear at all concerned with i686. Cloud is demoting[3] i686 from its offering. Workstation has been fairly ambivalent about it and recommends x86_64. Server does the same. Given the lack of focus on it, and the fact that the broader community is not testing the development releases for i686, I believe this would be a good first step. josh [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1247382 [2] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-February/208368.html [3] https://fedorahosted.org/cloud/ticket/106