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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> Relatedly, "x32" style "32 bit pointers on a 64 bit architecture" ABIs are not difficult to define but they also add a lot of extra complexity in the software stack for something niche.

I'm not sure that there's much undue complexity, at least on the kernel side. You just need to ensure that the process running with 32-bit pointers can avoid having to deal with addresses outside the bottom 32-bit address space. That looks potentially doable. You need to do this anyway for other restricted virtual address spaces that arise as a result of memory paging schemes, such as 48-bit on new x86-64 hardware where software may be playing tricks with pointer values and thus be unable to support virtual addresses outside the bottom 48-bit range.

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In practice it seems like it's not as simple as that; see this lkml post from a few years back pointing out some of the weird x32 specific syscall stuff they ended up with: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/10/1145

But my main point is that the complexity is not in the one-off "here's a patch to the kernel/compiler to add this", but in the way you now have an entire extra config that needs to be maintained and tested all the way through the software stack by the kernel, toolchain, distros and potentially random other software with inline asm or target specific ifdefs. That's ongoing work for decades for many groups of people.

Then the real question is whether this bespoke syscall mechanism will be needed going forward, especially as things like time_t adopt 64-bit values anyway. Can't we just define a new "almost 32-bit" ABI that just has 64-bit clean struct layouts throughout for all communication with the kernel (and potentially with system-wide daemons, writing out binary data, etc. so there's no real gratuitous breakage there, either), but sticks with 32-bit pointers at a systems level otherwise? Wouldn't this still be a massive performance gain for most code?

You could definitely do better than x32 did (IIRC it is a bit of an outlier even among "32-bit compat ABI" setups). But even if the kernel changes were done more cleanly that still leaves the whole software stack with the ongoing maintenance burden. The fact that approximately nobody has taken up x32 suggests that the performance gain is not worth it in practice for most people and codebases.

Defining yet another 32-bit-on-64-bit x86 ABI would be even worse, because now everybody would have to support x32 for the niche users who are still using that, plus your new 32-bit ABI as well.

But that maintenance burden has been paid off for things like 64-bit time_t on 32-bit ABI's. One couod argue that this changes the calculus of whether it's worth it to deprecate the old x32 (as has been proposed already) but also propose more general "ABI-like" ways of letting a process only deal with a limited range of virtual address space, be that 32-bit, 48-bit or whatever - which is, arguably, where most of the gain in "x32" is.

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