On 10/8/26 03:07, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
where certain workloads widely move to x32 and use it exclusively. In the meantime Debian introduced a patch to disable x32 by default (so it has to be enabled at boot time on the command line) because they are afraid of the increased attack surface. Fedora as far as I tell has X32 disabled (looking at 7.0-rc5 rpm in rawhide). Since there is practically no real use for x32
I only recently discovered x32 and built a Desktop (with all daemons and utilities running 10-30% smaller and some a bit faster, with 64 bit libraries for eg. Firefox.) My experiment should definitely not decide anything, but how much real-world use would be sufficient to justify continued presence (more complex compat code)?
If left behind a flag like Debian (like the 2014 proposal https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/), there are no security risks so I understand the benefit is reduced code complexity and maintenance burden. Older threads critiqued the implementation. What's the smallest kernel support which would keep 32-bit pointers possible? Could a small design (eg. just 32-bit pointers on x86-64 with i386's type layout, so no 3rd compat case (cf. MIPS n32 and o32)) work?
- Alex Alejandre
