Linux Kernel Developers Discuss Dropping x32 Support

[smitty3268]

I'm not sure what that has to do with "try to ensure most apps do fit already" (emphasis mine, your exact words). Since the topic is about halving the size of pointers, clearly the context is about fitting more stuff in cache.

And your optimizations work equally well in x32 and x86_64 modes and still waste more cache in x86_64 mode, it's not like they do more aggressive cache optimizations just because pointers are larger. You have to do it yourself.

[neozeed]

It's so annoying but I've been using ancient GCC/Binutils and other vintage tools of the 80's and only now just discovered x32. What an amazing silver bullet by letting me preserve old software but give it an added boost by treating 64bit long mode as a far more enhanced but still 32bit pointer safe machine.

I just built PGP 1.0 for the 30th anniversary of PGP, and adding gcc-7 along with the usual Debian 10 stuff

apt-get install gcc-7 lib32gcc-7-dev  libgcc-7-dev libx32gcc-7-dev gcc-7-multilib

and then simply adding -mx32 to the CFLAGS and it just works!

I'm sure if more people knew of this, it'd have become far more popular.