Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1074897/

The x32 ABI was meant
to be the best of both worlds, providing the expanded registers and
instruction set of the x86-64 architecture while preserving the lower
memory use of 32-bit systems. The Linux kernel has supported x32 since the
3.4 release in 2012. The initial excitement around x32 did not last,
though, and kernel developers are considering removing that support — and
not for the first time. Even the most unloved features tend to have a few
users, though, making removal hard.