On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 10:29 PM Ard Biesheuvel [off-list ref] wrote:

Thanks for chiming in.

At this point, it is really up to the maintainers to decide whether
the maintenance burden is worth it. The code itself seems pretty
uncontroversial afaict.

Might other distros be in a similar situation? Or is this specific to Debian?

My guess is that this is the most prominent on Debian: Many others including
have discontinued or reduced support for 32-bit builds across architectures:
Ubuntu only supports "Core" with fewer packages on Raspberry Pi 2 but
not desktop or server, Opensuse Leap and Tumbleweed both distributes a
lot of board specific images but you have to know where to look as the main
page only advertises amd64/i686/arm64/ppc64le/s390x, Fedora stopped
entirely.

Android may be an interesting distro here: there are still a lot of phones
running a pure 32-bit userland on Cortex-A53/A55 CPUs, and there are a
large number of applications built for this. As far as I can tell, they tend to
run 32-bit kernels as well, but that is not going to work on newer processors
starting with Cortex-A76 big cores or Cortex-A510 little cores.

archlinuxarm supports 32-bit and 64-bit machines equally, but they
apparently avoid the build service problem by using distcc with
x86-to-arm cross compilers, and they don't seem to support
their 32-bit images on 64-bit hardware/kernel.

https://hub.docker.com/search?q=&source=verified&type=image&architecture=arm&image_filter=official
lists 98 "official" arm32 images plus countless ones in other categories.
I think these are popular in memory-constrained cloud hosting
setups on arm64, so the Alpine based images are probably the most
interesting ones because of their size, but they would run under
someone else's kernel.

        Arnd

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