Re: Can we drop upstream Linux x32 support?

Andy Lutomirski
2018-12-14T21:24:44Z

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 1:22 PM Thomas Schöbel-Theuer
<thomas@schoebel-theuer.de> wrote:
>
> On 12/11/18 02:23, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > I'm seriously considering sending a patch to remove x32 support from
> > upstream Linux.
>
> I am downstream maintainer of several self-patched kernels at 1&1 Ionos.
> The kernels are rolled out to several tenthousands of production servers
> running in several datacenters and in multiple continents.
>
> Currently, we have a few thousands of servers relying on 32bit ABIs in
> some thousands of VMs and/or containers of various types (LXC, OpenVZ, etc).

I should clarify again: I am not suggesting that we drop 32-bit
support in the forseeable future. (Well, I might eventually suggest
that we drop support for 32-bit *hardware* at some point, but not for
32-bit compat software.) Linux's compat code is quite robust and is
even fairly maintainable.

I'm talking about x32, which is a different beast.