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Re: 32-bit architectures (was: Request to reconsider i386 (x86) port for Debian 13)



On Sun, 17 Aug 2025 at 12:15:00 +1000, James Tocknell wrote:
I think armhf CPUs are still being manufactured [...]
I think their main issue is the amount of RAM and number
and frequency of the cores

A more fundamental issue is the size of the virtual address space, and that is unsolvable. On a 32-bit architecture, there is no way that any single process can possibly have access to more than 4 GiB of virtual memory[1] because its pointers are simply not large enough to address more, even if the machine physically has more than that (merely adding RAM or swap won't help) - and for increasingly many packages, the compiler's working set won't fit in 4 GiB any more. Disabling debug symbols can kick this can further down the road for a while, at the cost of making architecture-specific bugs much harder to diagnose and fix.

If the 32-bit ports are going to survive, then the affected packages either need to be cross-compiled from a 64-bit architecture (which is not something that Debian has traditionally done and not something that our autobuilder network really supports), or dropped from the 32-bit ports (which means also dropping everything that depends or build-depends on them, recursively).

i386 since trixie is gradually becoming a partial architecture, where not all packages are expected to be built (for example no kernel), and I think that tendency will increase over time. armhf might well go through a similar process.

    smcv

[1] in practice less that that, because the kernel needs some of the
    address space for its own use


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