The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 12, 2018 17:05 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059)
Parent article: The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Too bad x32 came so late --- by that time, people were willing to accept the extra memory consumption.

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 13, 2018 15:44 UTC (Thu) by jimuazu (guest, #129212) [Link] (6 responses)

Exactly. For a long time I ran a multi-arch i386 + x86_64 setup with Debian, just so that I could run browsers in 32-bit mode, because they were the greatest resource hogs. For my next machine I got 20GB of RAM and switched to 64-bit everything, because x32 wasn't ready. I'd still use x32 if it was available in the distro, but even now I don't see viable support (or maybe I'm looking at the wrong pages). So how can they say it's not popular enough when it hasn't even reached Joe User yet?

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 13, 2018 23:03 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (5 responses)

It's been around for at least 6 years, and it's still not popular enough to reach Joe User. I'd say that qualifies as "not popular enough", personally - if it was worthwhile, surely Debian would have an x32 port by now?

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 14, 2018 10:43 UTC (Fri) by gspr (guest, #91542) [Link] (4 responses)

Debian does have an x32 port, although it is not a release architecture: https://wiki.debian.org/X32Port

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 14, 2018 12:41 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (3 responses)

From https://debian-x32.org/:

> What doesn't [work]: Gnome3, Iceweasel (WIP in #775321), Chromium (needs llvm), libreoffice (some java JNI issue). KDE works but is buggy. Sound ...

There's a warning on the site that the information might be outdated, but this might still explain why x32 isn't all that popular.

Also, the proposed Iceweasel (Firefox) patches just disable optimizations, which sort of defeats the purpose of an ABI whose solemn purpose seems to be to squeeze out extra bits of performance.

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 14, 2018 12:43 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

> proposed Iceweasel (Firefox) patches

some of proposed Iceweasel (Firefox) patches

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 14, 2018 21:41 UTC (Fri) by sorokin (guest, #88478) [Link] (1 responses)

> Also, the proposed Iceweasel (Firefox) patches just disable optimizations, which sort of defeats the purpose of an ABI

Disabling optimization is a bit ambiguous term. One might think it is about compiler optimization. Apparently the patches are about disabling assembler code in libjpeg-turbo because yasm doesn't support x32. The other change is disabling JIT for javascript.

The x32 subarchitecture may be removed

Posted Dec 16, 2018 0:51 UTC (Sun) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

"The other change is disabling JIT for javascript."

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?