The future of 32-bit support in the kernel

Just for clarity, the author of the post is Jonathan Corbet, summarizing a talk by Arnd Bergmann.

I can’t read what you read out of that summary. He very much tries to make sense of a messy space and makes a very clear statement that things will not be removed, while there is still a tangible impact on users and things are still in support.

Supporting unsupported hardware in the mainline kernel is a huge problem for quality control, you are literally fighting the vendor there, if it still exists. E.g. i know of a few discussions where the vendor of an architecture actively wants people to unmerge support for their old hardware. This is an uphill battle that i really just for a niche group of maintainers.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m very sympathetic to the retro/homebrew-scene. I’ve tried to figure out good ways how we can e.g. support them in the Rust compiler without stepping on the toes of vendors. That still does not mean that we should forget that there is a labour cost in all this. It all doesn’t come for free.

Talks that explore the space are never free of opinions, but I appreciate the overview very much.