RFC: 32-bit x86 port maintenance, stepping down as maintainer

[Andrew Haley]

On 7/10/24 12:06, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:

 > I would say properly maintaining the port at 1..3 level can take
 > about 1 full-time engineer with prior Hotspot/JDK experience, less
 > when you know where to cut the corners. So I would not recommend
 > this as a starter project. For a reasonable probability of success,
 > you need to have experience with Hotspot/JDK development, or have
 > enough time to work it out as you go, or both.

One other thing that is important: 32-bit support is already broken in
some ways, and especially the x86 ABI Linux is not compliant in that
it calls native code with a misaligned stack pointer. This is
surprisingly hard to fix.

Having to keep everything working on 32-bit x86 is a drain on
everyone. The back end contains 527 separate instances of #ifdef
_LP64, and every one of these is a burden for maintainers. (I just had
to add a few more.) It would be better for everyone to remove the
32-bit port, rather than have it half-maintained.

IMHO, rather than keep 32-bit x86 going, it would make more sense to
concentrate on trying to get the older 32-bit OpenJDK backport
versions in good shape. I don't think that it's possible to do both
without a lot of effort.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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