On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 10:29 PM Ard Biesheuvel <a...@kernel.org> wrote: > > Thanks for chiming in. > > At this point, it is really up to the maintainers to decide whether > the maintenance burden is worth it. The code itself seems pretty > uncontroversial afaict. > > Might other distros be in a similar situation? Or is this specific to Debian?
My guess is that this is the most prominent on Debian: Many others including have discontinued or reduced support for 32-bit builds across architectures: Ubuntu only supports "Core" with fewer packages on Raspberry Pi 2 but not desktop or server, Opensuse Leap and Tumbleweed both distributes a lot of board specific images but you have to know where to look as the main page only advertises amd64/i686/arm64/ppc64le/s390x, Fedora stopped entirely. Android may be an interesting distro here: there are still a lot of phones running a pure 32-bit userland on Cortex-A53/A55 CPUs, and there are a large number of applications built for this. As far as I can tell, they tend to run 32-bit kernels as well, but that is not going to work on newer processors starting with Cortex-A76 big cores or Cortex-A510 little cores. archlinuxarm supports 32-bit and 64-bit machines equally, but they apparently avoid the build service problem by using distcc with x86-to-arm cross compilers, and they don't seem to support their 32-bit images on 64-bit hardware/kernel. https://hub.docker.com/search?q=&source=verified&type=image&architecture=arm&image_filter=official lists 98 "official" arm32 images plus countless ones in other categories. I think these are popular in memory-constrained cloud hosting setups on arm64, so the Alpine based images are probably the most interesting ones because of their size, but they would run under someone else's kernel. Arnd
