x32 abi support?

[Alexander Larsson]

On Wed, 2012-05-16 at 15:30 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 04:28:31PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
> > Mhmm, so I was under the impression that x32 was mostly about increasing
> > the scalability of virtualized systems. i.e. run a higher number of
> > x32 containers/VM on an x86_64 host. Most server software that is run in
> > containers/VMs does not require 64bit address space, and hence using x32
> > for them should be quite benificial so that you can run more
> > containers/VMs per host. After all this would reduce memory and CPU
> > consumption of each, and due to smaller memory usage also result in less
> > IO?
> 
> I was under the impression that it was to make Android work better on 
> Intel. Scalable VMs are an interesting idea, but for a typical session 
> how much RAM are we talking about?

If you look at some contemporary VM hosting providers, like e.g.:
http://bloggerkhan.com/vps-hosting-vps-servers/185

You'll see that most of them are in the 384-1024 meg of ram range, and
almost none are larger than 4 gigs. I'm sure most of these run 32bit
images, but the hosts are likely 64bit, so it seems to make quite some
sense to use an x32 ABI here.