Rocky Linux 9 for 32-bit (i686)

Putting this in AltArch, not 100% sure where it goes.

I thought I’d share my latest mad science experiment: 32 bit (i686) Rocky 9!


Bit of background: The Rocky project publishes all binaries produced in an organized way via the “devel” repository in our repos. This is great, and allows people to make use of packages that aren’t included in the official RedHat-compatible repositories (BaseOS, AppStream, et al). As part of supporting select “multilib” packages for i686 (glibc.i686, openssl.i686, etc.), Rocky actually builds most packages in i686 as well as x86_64. Because of this, https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/9/devel/i686/ has almost everything you need to make an actual working system.

The big exception is the kernel. Fortunately, with some small modifications I was able to port the ELRepo 6.1.x LT kernel package to i686. This package combined with that devel/ repository is enough to create a bootable, working Rocky 9 system for i686 processors. My experiments show that only Pentium 4 or higher is supported, no Pentium 3 or earlier CPUs due to userspace gcc optimizations.

This was just an experiment, and comes with no warranty of any kind. I thought I’d publish it in case anyone was interested. Super thanks to the Rocky project and ELRepo for providing the tools - makes this sort of thing pretty easy to build, all told.

Enjoy!

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