Re: [PATCH v2] x86: Start removing X86_X32_ABI

[Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>]

On 2026-07-08 13:26:45 [+0200], Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2026, at 09:36, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
> > On 2026-07-08 08:31:30 [+0200], John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> >> > Since there is practically no real use for x32, start removing it by
> >> > removing the symbol first, not allowing to enable it. Should nothing
> >> > happening by the end of the year, it will removed after the last LTS
> >> > kernel this year.
> >> 
> >> As mentioned before, there are still actively maintained Debian and Gentoo
> >> ports of x32, so I guess the last paragraph is rather subjective.
> >
> > On the Debian ports side: lacks a browser like firefox or chromium. No
> > native ocaml compiler. libreoffice is not present.
> > Not once released in contrast to kFreeBSD.
> >
> > This does not look like healthy port that will become eventually a
> > release architecture. To quote the introduction paragraph of ports.d.o:
> > | The goal of this machine is to provide an infrastructure for unofficial
> > | architectures until they are integrated in the main Debian archive.
> 
> x32 is a bit different since you can't have a pure x32 distro
Why not?

> anyway but always need to install an x86_64 distro first
> to get a working kernel and base system before you can choose
> a mix 32-bit and 64-bit packages. This is not that different
> from armhf and i686, which run fine on 64-bit hardware but

You simply lack a Debian installer/ boot+install medium. Some ports
architectures to provide netboot images
	https://get.debian.org/images/ports/snapshots/2026-06-12/

> always require you to start with a 64-bit installer. [for
> different reasons though: armhf has an installer but its
> kernel only works on 32-bit machines; i686 kernels can
> theoretically run on older 64-bit hardware but Debian
> no longer provides an installer for it]
>
> As far as I understand, the typical use case for debian-x32 is
> to run just a single performance-critical application, either
> using "dpkg --add-architecture" or mmdebstrap/schroot. I used
> to do that for having a faster gcc a decade ago when I was using
> x86 build machines, though these days that probably fails
> due to the linker running out of virtual memory in large
> configurations.

The "problem" with not being part of the main distro ist that you can't
have the packages say from Trixie and have security updates along with
it. Instead you always track Sid or don't update.

> Either approach can keep working using Debian Forky as the host
> distro as long as that gets security updates for linux-image-7.3,
> presumaby mid-2032 for LTS or at the latest 2037 with the
> ELTS/SLTS kernels. This does require a choice for the Debian
> x32 team though: either freeze userspace to Forky as well for
> compatibility with 'dpkg --add-architecture', or stay on
> unstable/testing and only allow schroot installs going forward.
> 
> My guess is that it's similar for Gentoo, which doesn't have
> an x32 installer or kernel package either, though their kernel
> support times are apparently much shorter than Debian's.
> 
>         Arnd

Sebastian