[trimmed cross-post] On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 07:48:09AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote: > On Fri, 2018-09-28 at 14:16 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > * x32: maintained by the people who maintain the x86 port of the kernel > > H. Peter Anvin did the original port in 2012, but so far as I can see > none of the x86 maintainers have done any development on it since then. > And yes, development work has been needed: > > - x32 has 64-bit time_t and that never worked quite right. This may > have finally been fixed this year by Arnd Bergmann's work, but I'm > not sure. > - syscall restart was broken until 2015 when someone actually tested > it. > - There have been several regressions specific to x32, some of which > stuck around for a year or so before someone and fixed them. As a (lapsed) porter for x32 here in Debian, I don't think it's worth keeping. Despite all the touted benefits, no one uses the arch. There's a big difference between popcon 8 for an arch requiring obscure hardware or a FPGA, vs popcon that low for hardware everyone of us owns. Unlike kfreebsd-[x86] you can even conveniently run x32 in a chroot or lxc, yet no one does. The advertised benefits of the port are: * memory savings * a few percent speed gain over amd64 With primary use cases being hosting of multiple containers, and/or running a large number-crunching cluster. Sacrificing lots of human hassle for a 7% speed boost makes you a "Gentoo ricer"[1] on a desktop/laptop, but could be a nice thing on a $1M cluster. But, recently someone approached me with exactly that use case. He also required jessie, which happens to be the only release I have a consistent set of packages for. The evaluation result was: nope. A short while ago Linus pondered dropping x32, as it complicates kernel syscall code. The only proof he was told that "it's still in use" was my https://debian-x32.org -- yet that site hasn't been updated since jessie. Thus: I propose to drop x32, and reallocate your tuits to other archs. Meow! [1]. No offense for real Gentoo users, I mean the stereotype. -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ 10 people enter a bar: 1 who understands binary, ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ 1 who doesn't, D who prefer to write it as hex, ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ and 1 who narrowly avoided an off-by-one error.