Supporting 64-bit ARM systems

The instruction encoding is different though. ARM 32 and 64 are mutually incompatible at that level even if the source code looks similar. That said, AArch64 and ARMv8-A has ARMv7-A compatibility built-in the same way you can run Thumb and ARM code together these days. So there's no reason you can't run the old stuff in a 32-bit execution mode, the problem here is that the kernel itself absolutely has to run in 64-bit mode to manage this. The ability to run all this "legacy" code is going to be restricted to userspace.

It's not like PPC where the instruction encodings are identical to a high degree and 64-bit code barely has a handful of extra instructions for dealing with 64-bit values directly. Power Architecture was designed very, very well from the beginning, and the mnemonics are identical and the generated bytecode is identical barring the 64-bit specifics. You can't say that about ARM. ARM decided to reinvent the architecture to get rid of all that cruft (but they have to keep compatibility with at least the ARMv7).

Most of the available userspaces are going to stay ARMv7-A for a long, long time.. like running a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userspace is common on x86 these days (and x32 just compounds it). Those that need to have 64-bit userspaces will have them..