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Peter Anvin" , "Borislav Petkov" , "Dave Hansen" , "Ingo Molnar" , "Jonathan Corbet" , "Thomas Gleixner" , "Sam James" , "Neal Gompa" , "Tomas Glozar" , "Maciej W. Rozycki" , "Richard Purdie" Message-Id: <7545dc17-8c1a-45fb-bef9-6bbdca6e9c48@app.fastmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20260708123330.r0DKKjea@linutronix.de> References: <20260707212252.bYk3-AlU@linutronix.de> <20260708073648.c4xJo-8d@linutronix.de> <20260708123330.r0DKKjea@linutronix.de> Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] x86: Start removing X86_X32_ABI Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Wed, Jul 8, 2026, at 14:33, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote: > 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? ... > > 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/ As I understand, it's a policy in Debian for debian-installer and the kernel packages to only provide kernels for the native architecture, i.e. 64-bit x86 kernels are only packaged for amd64 and not x32 or i686, and 64-bit Arm kernels are only packaged for arm64 but not armhf or formerly armel. It would of course be trivial to create a kernel package with a 64-bit kernel inside of an x32/armhf/armel .deb file, but that would not be included as an official package. >> 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. This is also more a policy problem than a technical one. Obviously one could build all Trixie (or Forky in the future) source packages for x32 the same way that debian-ports today contains Sid packages. I don't know if including those in debian-ports would fundamentally changes that is run, or if that just needs someone to do it. Arnd