32bit support

The reason for dropping 32-bit support is simple. Only a handful of people are still using 32bit-only hardware, while some 32bit users actually had 64bit hardware running. The extra amount of time and effort for hardware not anymore available to the dev team, in keeping up 32bit support, is simply not worth it anymore.

Quote from Kivutar

OpenELEC dropped 32bit support in version 6.

What about adding it back?

What is your stance about retro compatibility? Are you going to drop features to maintain a small codebase like OE does, or are you going to take a different path?

At the time OE dropped i386 there were ~7.5k active i386 users, but only ~1.5k had a true 32-bit only CPU (the settings addon was tweaked to collect anonymous stats on this) so the majority could (and most since did) update to a 64-bit build. It was something like 0.003% of the active userbase at the time. It would be an even smaller percentage today.

OE has never been a great distro for recycling old hardware with and LE has no intentions of being different. We're not going to rush back and fill the tiny i386 niche with an official build. We will be thoughtful of long-term direction to avoid bloat when making any changes, but overall, and to quote Dr. Spock: "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"

That said. Once we've found our operating rhythm and I have some free time I will be rebasing patches and releasing a private LibreELEC 7.0 (Jarvis) community build for the mk1 AppleTV (as I have done in the past under OE) and since this is an i386 build with CrystalHD support it will be relatively straightforward for someone else in the community to figure out the remaining changes needed to create a 32-bit "Generic" image from the same github branch. If someone does the work I'd be happy to merge their PR's so others can self-build their own i386 images.

How about ion/ion2 ? Those nvidia chipsets do great hardware acceleration and PQ?

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Most ION2 boxes have Intel Atom D525 CPU, which is 64bit capable.

Yeah but they need a legacy driver (so I guess my question is off topic in that it isn't about 32/64 bit, but on topic in relation to slightly older hardware)

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I just looked at my generic loaded machine and was coming back to say that it seems to have both nvidia and nvidia-legacy drivers. But you beat me to it.

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Quote from nickr

I just looked at my generic loaded machine and was coming back to say that it seems to have both nvidia and nvidia-legacy drivers. But you beat me to it.

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Yes LE generic has a feature where it will magically use the legacy driver if the GPU is not currently supported by nvidea. This doesn't cover archaic GPUs but ION2 etc will work fine. The beauty of this is that generic and legacy are now one build simplifying it for users.