Comment 2 for bug 2021925

Hi Otto,

In Ubuntu (>= Focal) i386 is a partial architecture: only some packages get compiled for i386 (see [1]), and they need to be installed on a amd64 system with i386 as a foreign architecture.

The packages you mentioned (ahven, mariadb) do not get compiled for i386. You may wonder why autopkgtest runs are still sometimes attempted for those. The system is far from perfect and apparently i386 tests can still be enqueued, but they eventually fail because of missing packages.

I hope this explains.

[1] https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/+git/i386/tree/i386