Tails

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2014-10-29 13:40:55

I’ve asked frontdesk if they want to collect stats about what kernel (32 vs. 64-bit) is used on machines that report bugs.

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2014-10-30 09:31:28

Stats for 2014 Q2-Q3:

Note that I’ve dropped the 2014Q1 stats, as they do not mean anything wrt. 32-bit vs. 64-bit: before Tails 0.23 (March 18, 2014), vmlinuz2 was a 686-pae kernel, not a 64-bit one.

#4 Updated by intrigeri 2014-10-31 15:04:44

These statistics were generated with:

find -iname "*.eml" | while read email ; do
   echo "${email}"
   gpg --quiet --output "${email%.eml}.asc" --decrypt "${email}"
done

for folder in 2014Q{1,2,3} ; do
   echo "${folder}"
   echo "vmlinuz"
   grep --files-with-matches "BOOT_IMAGE=/live/vmlinuz " ${folder}/*.asc | wc -l
   echo "vmlinuz2"
   grep --files-with-matches "BOOT_IMAGE=/live/vmlinuz2 " ${folder}/*.asc | wc -l
done

#5 Updated by Dr_Whax 2014-11-03 22:11:58

I think that 18% of users on only X86 hardware is quite a lot and we can’t just simply drop them. There’s simply no excuse to do that.

Perhaps we should drop this for now, revisit this idea when we have reached our Tails 3.0 goals and see how much work it would be at that point in time?

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2014-11-03 22:29:17

> I think that 18% of users on only X86 hardware is quite a lot and we can’t just simply drop them. There’s simply no excuse to do that.

Agreed. My point, in starting to gather these stats now, was not to make a decision immediately. It was rather to provide data points when we come back to it, say in 6-10 months, when Tails/Jessie is almost ready and (oh, surprise) has hardware requirements that are unlikely to be satisfied by more that a third of these 32-bits systems.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the 32-bit/64-bit ratio dropped quite a bit until then anyway: hardware gets old, hardware dies. The remaining 32-bit boxes used in production around me won’t live another full year.

> Perhaps we should drop this for now, revisit this idea when we have reached our Tails 3.0 goals and see how much work it would be at that point in time?

I agree, assuming you meant 2.0.

#12 Updated by intrigeri 2015-04-14 13:10:07

OK, thanks! It seems that 32-bit is slowly losing ground.

#15 Updated by sajolida 2015-10-06 10:45:08

Here you go:

./2015Q2

./2015Q3

#16 Updated by Anonymous 2015-10-06 14:06:47

sajolida wrote:
> Here you go:
>
> ./2015Q2
>
> | 32-bit | 27 | 15% |
> | 64-bit | 155 | 85% |
>
> ./2015Q3
>
> | 32-bit | 36 | 14% |
> | 64-bit | 213 | 86% |

woah!

#20 Updated by sajolida 2016-02-17 12:38:35

./2015Q4 is better:

#21 Updated by sajolida 2016-04-29 04:20:16

./2016Q1 is stable despite 2.0:

| 32-bit | 32 | 8% |
| 64-bit | 349 | 91% |

#22 Updated by sajolida 2016-04-29 04:24:02

But actually a good share of these are virtual machines :)

grep -rl "BOOT_IMAGE=/live/vmlinuz " * | while read file ; do grep -A 1 system-product-name $file ; done | grep -v system-product-name | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

     10 VirtualBox
      3 Satellite A100
      3 MS-7728
      2 Inspiron 510m                   
      2                                 
      1 VMware Virtual Platform
      1 TravelMate C310              .     
      1 Stylistic ST5112
      1 MM061                           
      1 Hi-Fi A85S3
      1 dynabook SS S31 120S/2W
      1 Aspire 5610Z    
      1 Aspire 2020
      1 AOA110
      1 AMILO Pro Edition V3405
      1 1101HA
      1 1015CX

#23 Updated by Dr_Whax 2016-04-29 05:23:38

The question in my opinion that gets raised now is, at which % of 32-bit users are we going to say, this is low enough that we should consider shipping an X86_64 iso. Will we wait another month to see if usage of 32-bit kernels are staying the same and then move to make a decision? Since then, it’s been 8/9 months since Tails/jessie.

#24 Updated by intrigeri 2016-04-29 07:29:36

sajolida wrote:
> But actually a good share of these are virtual machines :)

I think it’s safe to assume that the hardware able to run Tails in a VM is most likely 64-bit, and is running a 64-bit host OS (this seems plausible given our current hardware requirements, and e.g. the 10 VirtualBox ones are probably due to https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11037 that forces us to tell users to set up a 32-bit VM). So IMO we should just ignore the 32-bit VMs from these stats.

Other than those, we have (32 - (10+1)) / (32 + 349) = 5.5% of bare metal 32-bit systems.

DrWhax wrote:
> The question in my opinion that gets raised now is, at which % of 32-bit users are we going to say, this is low enough that we should consider shipping an X86_64 iso. Will we wait another month to see if usage of 32-bit kernels are staying the same and then move to make a decision?

I think that at about 5% (given the above), we can already seriously start considering the switch to 64-bit: waiting for the long tails of 32-bit hardware to die can very well take years, and IMO we’ve already reached the acceptable limit to move on. And we already have 2 years of data, which sounds more than enough to have confidence in our estimates.

Still, IMO it would be nice to combine the switch to 64-bit with another, easier to understand, change in hardware requirements. I’m thinking e.g. of the move to Debian Stretch. I would not be ready to commit to it formally, but it would be nice to informally make the “if I get a ‘new’ box to be able to upgrade to Tails 2.0, then it’ll work for all 2.x releases and I won’t have to get another computer before 3.x” reasoning valid. Granted, that’s quite a weak argument. I’m not sure. I could also live with switching now (as in: whenever any of us has time to make it happen, which would be ~2016Q4 I guess).

#25 Updated by intrigeri 2016-06-07 12:16:51

Note that shipping both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels makes e.g. Feature #10298 much harder than it should be (Bug #9969); that’s one argument in favour of switching to 64-bit, instead of spending lots of time to support two kernels now, and then dropping all that work in 6-12 months.

#29 Updated by intrigeri 2016-06-09 07:54:46

sajolida wrote:
> But actually a good share of these are virtual machines :)

I’ve looked at the bare metal systems on that list.

Some of those are irrelevant for the discussion at hand:

• dynabook SS S31: 2009, unknown by memory upgrade wizards, probably soldered RAM given form factor
• Hi-Fi A85S3 and MS-7728: supports only 64-bit CPU, no idea why it’s listed there, let’s blame syslinux auto-detection
• AOA110: 2007-2008, max. 512MB RAM => not supported

Relevant for this discussion:

• Aspire 2020: 2004, max. 2GB RAM
• Dell Inspiron 510m: 2004, max. 2GB RAM
• TravelMate C310: 2005, max. 2GB RAM
• Toshiba Satellite A100: 2006, max. 2GB RAM
• Dell Inspiron 6400 MM061: 2006, max. 2GB RAM
• Aspire 5610Z: 2007, max. 2GB RAM
• Fujitsu AMILO Pro V3405: 2007, max. 2GB RAM
• Asus Eee PC 1101HA: 2009, max. 2GB RAM
• Eee PC 1015CX: 2012, max. 2GB RAM

My next question would be: do we actually support these systems in practice? I.e. were the bug reported about issues that prevent one from using Tails, and if yes, were we able to fix it? We’ve seen issues with old graphics cards vs. GNOME Shell (Bug #11096), that we were not able to solve.

sajolida, if it’s not too painful for you, it would be great if you could have a look at the bug report threads regarding these (relevant) systems, to give us an idea of whether they actually work on Tails currently. If you want to save time, only look at the ones that are from 2007 or later (I suspect that the 10+ years old hardware among those won’t last much longer).

#30 Updated by intrigeri 2016-07-30 10:15:09

FTR sajolida sent me some data, but he did it using a sharing service that expires stuff after a while, and sadly I didn’t look at it early enough so I could not access it. Anyway, I think we have enough info to make a decision wrt. Tails 3.0 (I could do Feature #10298 without blocking on this topic so it’s less an emergency than what I thought a couple months ago), so I’ll sum this up and will send a proposal on tails-dev@, and add the issue to the next monthly meeting’s agenda.

#34 Updated by intrigeri 2016-07-31 07:04:01

Proposal sent to tails-dev: https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-dev/2016-July/010822.html.

#40 Updated by intrigeri 2016-08-28 09:54:45

http://nightly.tails.boum.org/build_Tails_ISO_feature-8183-64bit-userspace/lastSuccessful/archive/ has 64-bit ISOs now. Due to Bug #11694 one has to manually switch to VT 2 (with CTRL-ALT-F2) after clicking “Login” in the Greeter. At first glance, ISOs built from this branch work just as fine as those built from feature/stretch, but the state of the test suite on these branches is not good enough yet to be sure.

#47 Updated by sajolida 2016-11-15 15:28:15

I removed the FAQ we had on 64-bit proc with 89539bb.