A Call For Ending 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop ISOs

[ssokolow]

32-bit needs to die. I'm tired of having a bunch of 32-bit crap on my system because a few people are clinging to 10+ year old CPUs. 64-bit is better and faster, 32-bit was obsolete 10 years ago.

In your case, it's not directly because a few people are clinging to 10+ year old CPUs... it's because game and middleware developers still haven't given up that "If not both, then 32-bit only" attitude that Windows chose to encourage for applications. The attitude can easily outlive the processors by who knows how long.

[caligula]

Actually, I can think of only 2 reasons 64-bit would use more ram than 32-bit.

1 -- Actually, you're running a multiarch OS and it's ALSO loading 32-bit libraries. So, both 64-bit AND 32-bit. Obviously, that uses more RAM. Stick to pure 64-bit, problem solved.
2 -- The addresses themselves; any pointer in 64-bit will obviously require twice as much space in memory as a 32-bit pointer. However, this difference should be trivial at best. Maybe in the 100Mb range tops for a running desktop with applications loaded.

Have you even tried to compare these in practice. Your 3 line long calculations are utter crap. Go install 32bit and 64bit OS and see for yourself the difference. I can verify the results. In real world, machines with <= 4 GB always win some free memory with an 32-bit OS. You can even enable SSE2/SSE3. You just need to compile yourself. 64-bit binaries are larger, pointers are larger. Why are you so surprised that it also uses more RAM? And no it's not because the system loads both 32 and 64 bit libs.

If you have these low end CPUs with really small per core cache, 64 bits might actually hurt because the cache fills up more quickly, the TLB and addressing is different. But you need to measure it yourself to be certain. I think the 64bit code is usually always faster if you have at least 768 kB of cache per core. Some cheap low end Celerons only have 512 kB per core. But the memory is a bigger issue if you only have 1 gig or less. I'd recommend a single bzImage without module support and zram.

[WorBlux]

NO! x86-64 needs to die! Long live x32 ABI!

Whereas x32 beats x86 and amd64 in many situations, it is still limited by the 4GB per process limitation.

[Delgarde]

The x32 ABI could have had its uses. Unfortunately no distro ever seemed interested in supporting it.

And it's not hard to see why. If you had a good machine, you probably wanted x86_64 so you could take full advantage of it. If you had a machine that wasn't 64-bit capable, you had to stay with classic x86. If you had binaries to run, you likewise needed x86, probably on top of a x86_64 platform.

X32 was just too niche... it wasn't compatible with old hardware or binaries, so it couldn't replace x86 - and it couldn't address large amounts of memory, so it wasn't as good as x86_64. The one advantage it offered was that it provided some of the performance benefits of the new 64-bit hardware while being a bit more frugal of memory... but that wasn't enough of a selling point for the distros to bother supporting it.

[SaucyJack]

In your case, it's not directly because a few people are clinging to 10+ year old CPUs... it's because game and middleware developers still haven't given up that "If not both, then 32-bit only" attitude that Windows chose to encourage for applications. The attitude can easily outlive the processors by who knows how long.

Developers make 32-bit programs because of the tiny market it still represents. Microsoft has actually perpetuated this issue by offering 32-bit OSs for far longer than they should have.

[smitty3268]

No that is not the question. I do not run 32-bit Ubuntu because my CPU requires it. I run it because 64-bit wastes 20-30% of my system's RAM.

You could probably also save 20-30% of your system's ram by switching from Ubuntu to a lightweight distro, so why haven't you done that?

I mean, I understand why someone with only 2GB of RAM would want to stick with a 32-bit OS, but do you really want to use Ubuntu? That seems slightly crazy to me.

[anarki2]

What about my Dell Mini 10v netbook? It runs Ubuntu 14.04 just fine. Perhaps a little slow, but more than usable for sure. The idea that 32 bit computers can't handle Ubuntu Unity 7 or 8 is bullshit. Lots of 32 bit machines out there that can run modern Ubuntu with Unity 7 or 8. My netbook has an atom cpu and 1 gb ram. If my netbook can run Ubuntu then plenty of 32 bit machines with 2 or 4 GB Ram can too.

Yeah, 14.04. So what. We're talking about future cycles, such as 16.10 or 17.04 even.

[unixfan2001]

I can verify the results.

Then please do. I look forward to seeing your benchmarks and calculations.

[xeros]

What about non-x86 archs? There are other 32-bit architectures, like ARMv7, supported by Ubuntu - like *PI's, tablets... or even phones that are still manufactured.
I hope that they are not going to drop all 32-bit architectures.

Besides that, regarding x86, I still have my old 32-bit Pentium 4 with 4GB RAM that I still would like to use for next few years - not as main desktop for everyday use for web browsing, but I still have many use cases for it, especially that I have there few 3,5" 500GB-1TB disks connected to it and I manage my photos & recorded movies on it.

[Herem]

I think there are some strange lines of thought here:
...
- lots of code needs to be build for 32bit and tested anyway, f.i. my ubuntu MX7 phone runs on ARM7. How is that not Ubuntu? Or is that convergence never going to happen?
- in fact the need for 32bits code depends on just this: can the processor execute 64 bit instruction or not. And in fact lots of older processors can't and neither can lot of newer (ARM, certain ATOM)

As the article is referring to dropping support for Desktop i386 ISOs I don't see how this would affect your phone, convergence or any other ARM processors which you are referring to?