Re: [PATCH v1 0/3] Meson A1 32-bit support

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023, at 16:51, Dmitry Rokosov wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 03:58:50PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> 
>> I would argue that is a problem with buildroot, and using a 32-bit
>> kernel is not something we should encourage over fixing buildroot
>> to do it right, or building the kernel separately from the rootfs.
>> 
>> We do allow building support for a couple of ARMv8 SoCs in 32-bit
>> mode, but that is usually because they ship with a 32-bit bootrom
>> and cannot actually run a 64-bit kernel.
>
> To be honest, I didn't know about this principle. It looks like a very
> rational approach "start from max supported bitness".
> Based on overall maintainers opinion, we have to prepare a patch for
> buildroot to support compat mode :)

That would be great, thanks a lot!

For what it's worth, the main arguments in favor of running a 64-bit
kernel with compat user space over a 32-bit kernel are support for:

- larger RAM sizes without highmem (most 32-bit kernels only
  support 768MB of lowmem, and highmem sucks)
- larger virtual address space (4GB vs 3GB or less)
- CPU specific errata workarounds (arch/arm/ only has those for 32-bit cpus)
- mitigations for common attacks such as spectre
- security hardening that depends on larger address space
  (KASLR, BTI, ptrauth, PAN, ...)
- emulating instructions that were removed in Armv8 (setend, swp, ...)

Most of these don't apply in userspace, so the incentive to
run smaller 32-bit userland on systems with less than 1GB of
RAM usually outweighs the benefits of 64-bit userspace.

      Arnd