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From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Date:   Fri, 14 Dec 2018 13:24:28 -0800
Message-ID: <CALCETrV0fVLZKG6JrOvzvOzP06UxhZW=LbHpPXbonoeFdPJB1A@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Can we drop upstream Linux x32 support?
To:     thomas@schoebel-theuer.de
Cc:     Andrew Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>, X86 ML <x86@kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>,
        Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>,
        "H. J. Lu" <hjl.tools@gmail.com>, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>,
        x32@buildd.debian.org, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>,
        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 1:22 PM Thomas Sch=C3=B6bel-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, et=
c).

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.