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Comment by M95D | Hacker News Reader

> Sadly, and as far as I can tell, x32 is pretty much abandonware today. Gentoo claims to support it but there are no official builds of any distribution I can find that are built in x32 mode.

It is supported, but the list of broken packages is rather long... [1]

You don't need an official build, as Gentoo builds itself and also cross-builds itself for any target and any ABI. In this case, you don't even need a cross-build.

Just install Gentoo x86_64 multilib, enable x32 support in kernel, enable abi_x86_x32 USE flag for the packages you want to test and run emerge to build them. They won't even interfere with the rest of the running system. See [2].

[1] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/master/profiles/arch/a...

[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Multilib/Concepts

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147 packages don't strike me as that many, that's less than 1% of all Gentoo packages. I expected much more.

EDIT: And several of those packages are binaries. Apart from the *-bin packages, I've identified TeamSpeak, dev-libs/amdgpu-pro-opencl, Skype, and Slack. That leaves 138 packages.

Yeah, but one of those packages is nodejs. That means no firefox, no transmission, almost nothing with a web ui.

(Sane) web UIs in general should be fine, since they can just use the browser's JS engine. I don't think transmission is affected, at least it's not listed as masked.

You're right about firefox though, which is weird. Apparently node is a build dependency, but I can't figure out if that's something specific to the ebuild (that Arch's PKGBUILD does as well) or just generally something the buildsystem requires, but it's not listed as a dependency at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.ht....

x32 was such a waste of time and resources for Intel. While the world was moving to 64 bit, someone at Intel had the "bright" idea to go back to the past, and create a new 32 bit architecture (???) that was incompatible with traditional Windows applications (????)

Now, in 2024, 32 bit cell phone CPUs seem like a distant memory and nobody remembers what the hell x32 was even for.

x32 is a different (possibly badly designed) Linux kernel ABI for programs running in 64-bit mode on regular x86-64 processors, but with 32-bit pointers. It has nothing to do with Intel or Windows.

It's an architecture from the Linux kernel's point of view, although it runs on existing hardware. However, it's not accurate to say it has nothing to do with Intel -- they designed and funded it. And it was a waste of resources since the world was going 64 bit, and that was obvious even at the time.

Realistically, Windows is the platform keeping 32 bit code alive, in the form of all those legacy binaries. MacOS and Linux have moved on. So if you design something new for 32 bit that can't be used by Windows, it's DOA.

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