Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! By Jonathan CorbetSeptember 1, 2025 OSS EU Arnd Bergmann started his Open Source Summit Europe 2025 talk with a clear statement of position: 32-bit systems are obsolete when it comes to use in any sort of new products. The only reason to work with them at this point is when there is existing hardware and software to support. Since Bergmann is the overall maintainer for architecture support in the kernel, he is frequently asked whether 32-bit support can be removed. So, he concluded, the time has come to talk more about that possibility. People naturally think about desktop machines first, he continued. If you were running Linux in the 1990s, you had a 32-bit, desktop system. Unix systems, though, moved to 64-bit platforms around 30 years ago, and the Linux desktop made that move about 20 years ago. Even phones and related devices have been 64-bit for the last decade. If those systems were all that Linux had to support, 32-bit support would have long since been removed from the kernel. He summarized the situation with this slide, showing how the non-embedded architectures have transitioned to either 64-bit or nonexistence over time: The world is not all desktops — or servers — though; embedded Linux exists as well. About 90% of those systems are running on Arm processors. The kernel has accumulated a lot of devicetree files describing those systems over the years; only in this last year has the number of devicetrees for armv8 (64-bit) systems exceeded the number for armv7 (32-bit) systems. For Arm processors with pre-armv7 architectures, there are only three for which it is still possible to buy hardware, but a number are still supported by the kernel community: ...
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