alt Hacker News> open source isn’t supposed to be about market pricing or what’s convenient for vendors; it’s about giving users the freedom to decide what’s worth running.
Ehhh, it's about users having the ability to run whatever they like. Which they do.
If a group of users of 32 bit hardware care to volunteer to support the latest kernel features, then there's no problem.
If no one does, then why should a volunteer care enough to do it for them? It's not like the old kernel versions will stop working. Forcing volunteers to work on something they don't want to do is just a bad way to manage volunteers.
Replies
That is a fair point! I do think though that it would make sense for maintainers to at least put out an open call to users and developers before dropping something as fundamental as 32 bit support. The reality is that not all users are going to be kernel developers, and even many developers today aren’t familiar with the workflow kernel development requires. Mailing lists, patch submission processes, and the cultural expectations around kernel work are all a pretty steep barrier to entry, even if someone does care about the removal and also happens to be a developer.
The other dynamic here is that the direction in Linux does come from the top. When you have maintainers like Arnd Bergmann saying they would "like" to remove support for hardware (like the ARM boards), that sets the tone, and other contributors will naturally follow that lead. If leadership encouraged a philosophy closer to "never break existing hardware" the same way we’ve had "never break userspace" for decades, we probably wouldn’t even be debating removing 32 bit.
I’m not saying kernel devs need to carry the weight alone, but it would be nice if the community’s baseline stance was towards preservation rather than obsolescence. :(
> If a group of users of 32 bit hardware care to volunteer to support the latest kernel features, then there's no problem.
It's not just the case that you need people to support 32bit/nommu; you also have to account for the impact on other kernel devs working on features that are made harder.
This is called out in the article around keeping highmem support.