Tired of hostility towards anything that isn't current-gen

Posted Sep 13, 2025 1:52 UTC (Sat) by awilfox (guest, #124923)
Parent article: The future of 32-bit support in the kernel

Articles like this are why I'm still holding on to a patchset I wrote nine months ago that fixes KVM on 32-bit and 64-bit big endian Power. I've sent it to at least a dozen people by now, and all are very happy with it, and it applies to 5.15, 6.6, 6.12, and head. And I don't send it to lkml or kvmppc or linuxppc-dev because I am *terrified* at being the next to be yelled at for "using this old crap". The next to get piled on with hate comments. The next to be vilified by a seeming lynchmob of commenters, arm-chair quarterbacks, and actual kernel developers, all with the goal of driving out anything that cannot be purchased right now. God forbid LWN or Phoronix pick it up and I get actual targeted threats again, like when I made Firefox run on PPC64.

I wrote this KVM patch because it's not "old crap". It's the hardware I use to run Linux. It's the hardware I enjoy running Linux on. When I started using Linux in 1999, the barrier to entry was "do you have the hardware, did you test it, and is the code good quality". Now, the barrier to entry seems to be "is it still sold by the vendor". If I wanted that sort of experience, I would be running Windows.

I've also started working on making Nouveau work on big endian systems again. And the fd.o people were realistic, saying there was probably a lot of issues, and they don't want to spend their time helping me - but if I get somewhere, send them patches, and they'd still happily take them. Why not write articles like *that*? Why not say "we don't really want to deal with this any more, but if you do, take maintainership". Even the Itanium got a question of "does anyone want to take it up" before removal! Or is the idea of supporting big endian and/or 32-bit systems so offensive that even if offered maintainers, you wouldn't want them?

I know Arnd, and I don't think he is quite as hostile as the article comes across. In my experience, he has been lovely to work with. The rest of the kernel maintainers, not so much. And the Internet peanut gallery? The icing on the cake of why I can't bring myself to bother with the kernel any more.

Tired of hostility towards anything that isn't current-gen

Posted Sep 16, 2025 7:32 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Things like 32bit and endianess aren't really the "take maintainership" kind of features though. You have to consider them throughout the whole code base, so it is hard to push maintainership of those features onto the community of people who care (quite independently of the question if that community even has enough volunteers to do the work if you could separate it out).

Also, both of 32bit and big endian have been on a long decline, so this is hardly the first sign that they would eventually be removed.

Tired of hostility towards anything that isn't current-gen

Posted Sep 16, 2025 16:07 UTC (Tue) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

>we don't really want to deal with this any more, but if you do, take maintainership

The problem is that these people that take over maintainership basically don't exist. Even if they promise to do so, that rarely actually happens.
That means at the end maintainership for the "old stuff" is left to the normal maintainers.
And that's why they want to get rid of old stuff.

And it goes way beyond that: Keeping old things alive often causes overhead in completely different areas. Especially with things like big-endian support or general 32bit support. Putting maintenance burden on people who have never heard of the "old stuff" that some hobby enthusiast wants to keep going.

You see, if you want to keep ancient stuff running, you can just use an old kernel and/or an old distribution.