Linux Kernel Developers Discuss Dropping x32 Support (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader shared a report: It was just several years ago that the open-source ecosystem began supporting the x32 ABI, but already kernel developers are talking of potentially deprecating the support and for it to be ultimately removed..

[...] While the x32 support was plumbed through the Linux landscape, it really hasn't been used much. Kernel developers are now discussing the future of the x32 ABI due to the maintenance cost involved in still supporting this code but with minimal users. Linus Torvalds is in favor of sunsetting x32 and many other upstream contributors in favor of seeing it deprecated and removed.

Comments

Re: No!

[lgw]

Perhaps you could not be retarded and just know this?
X32 is a stupid version of 64 bit that uses 32-bit pointers.
Never understood who thought this was a good idea.

People who care about memory footprint? Linux is used in some pretty small systems, still. If you have far, far less than 4GB you not only don't need 64-bit addressing, you need to not waste 4 bytes on every pointer.

Why not just use x86? More registers (and x64 has a lot more registers) can make a real performance impact.

Re: No!

[Anonymous Coward]

An x64 processor is expensive, large, and power-hungry for modern "pretty small systems." If you have far, far less than 4GB, you've probably moved to 32-bit ARM.

Re: Al Gore & conmen like him = hypocrites

[lgw]

So, yes, human activity is driving the warming over the past few decades. Insult me if you must, but that won't change the physics involved.

You gave a nice middle-school level Earth Science description of how global warming works, but you gave no evidence for this claim. Obviously, human activity affects the climate, the question is: just how much, exactly?

If you look a bit deeper into the science you'll find it's all about feedback loops. The amount of CO2 in our atmosphere wouldn't amount to much warming without positive feedback loops. There are also negative feedback loops, and it's all poorly understood, which is while climate science is an actual science where original work is happening. If it were all so clear, it wouldn't be a field of study.

Just to start: almost all of the greenhouse* effect comes from water vapor. The atmosphere is effectively saturated, so the key is how much water can the air hold at a given temperature. Warmer air holds more water, so positive feedback. But wait, more clouds increases the Earth's albedo, so negative feedback. This also is why no climate (or weather) model is meaningful without modeling the oceans (ocean temps matter a heck of a lot).

*"Greenhouse" effect is a stupid name. Greenhouses work by letting in light and blocking convective losses (and limiting conductive too, in anything modern). Glass trapping outgoing IR barely matters.