There has been a number of updates in the blog about 'coming soon' and 'in testing and available shortly' but still no 32-bit support months later. Can we get an update on the 32-bit roadmap?

Is there a specific reason why you need a 32-bit kernel?

Yes. I could detail all the reasons here but the short story is I need to run a 32-bit pv-grub kernel. Moving forward if Linode is planning to never support 32-bit that is their option but I would at least like to know if it is still on the roadmap as they have stated it is numerous times in the blog and various support tickets in the last few months.

Still no word on this? I need 32 bit support as well and despite the promises of *soon*, nothing seems to be happening.

Hello,

Our hardware team is working hard to implement 32-bit compatibility across our SSD platform. We do not currently have an ETA for this, but our hardware team is working around the clock to implement this.

We do apologize for any inconvenience.

Thank you,

Dave.

32-bit upgrades are now available. Just open a support ticket to get started & our support team will be happy to configure a migration for you!

Do new nodes automatically have the ability to run 32-bit kernels or does it still require a support ticket?

I went ahead and burned a penny. No out of the box 32-bit kernels available on new nodes yet. Hopefully soon, but it is a start...

While our hardware and development teams have worked hard over the last year to make the latest upgrades available to Linodes with 32-bit kernels, there were, and still are, several hurdles to overcome, which is why we made the tough decision to announce that we were dropping support for new 32-bit deployments back in April.

We're keeping our promise to deliver upgrades to existing 32-bit Linodes, but going forward all new Linodes will only be 64-bit, so that we can focus our development effort on improving other areas of our service, making new products, etc. We apologize for the confusion regarding new 32-bit instances being deprecated and any inconvenience this causes.

Please feel free to email us if you have any other questions.

- Jonathan

While I can see the writing on the wall long term, I still find a lot of value in 32-bit userspace on the smaller Linodes, as well as cases of needing new nodes to maintain compatibility with existing systems. The kernel compatibility is unfortunate, but even with that, can't help wishing that you hadn't jettisoned 32-bit userspace along with the kernel issues. That, is, it would be nice to still be able to select the previously available 32-bit distributions as starting points, just with a 64-bit kernel, when installing a new Linode. That results in a system no different than how 32-bit upgrades on the new platform had been recommended, and at least for some distributions (e.g,. Debian/Ubuntu with multiarch) works just fine in userspace and with system tools.

Granted, I can clone my existing Linodes as a starting point instead, but that brings all their existing baggage along for the ride, so is a little more work to clean up afterwards.

-- David

Although we will not be producing any new 32-bit distribution images, our previous images are still available for deployment on SSD hosts, they're just created with a 64-bit kernel in the configuration profile. These can be found in the "Older Distributions" section of the distro menu. No baggage required!

Oh, that would definitely work for my use case. Except when I looked there last (just checked again now), it doesn't look like the previous Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is included (just 10.04 and 13.10). 12.04 only appears now in the 64-bit distribution. Maybe just an oversight?

-- David

That is unfortunate as I didn't read dropping forever into the original announcement. At least now I know. And I must solve my 32-bit requirement going forward or find another provider. Thank you for the straight forward statement.

Our current 12.04 LTS disk image is actually the 12.04.4 release from February 2014, so we no longer have a 32-bit image available due to the fact that this particular version came out after we stopped putting out new 32-bit images. The 13.10 version is also 64-bit.

The good news is that it's still possible to get Ubuntu 12.04 with a 32-bit user space, and without the cruft from one of your existing Linodes, if you wanted to copy your own image over:

https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-distros/running-a-custom-linux-distro-on-a-linode-vps

If you choose to go this route, you can use the Linode Images beta to keep your custom 32-bit 12.04 image as a gold master for any other Linodes you want to deploy with it.

I hope this helps!