On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 04:28:39PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 3:44 PM Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Testing this will be a challenge, but the issue was real - a 7GB > > highmem machine isn't crazy and I expect the inode has become larger > > since those days. > > Hmm. I would say that in the intening years a 7GB highmem machine has > indeed become crazy. > > It used to be something we kind of supported. > > But we really should consider HIGHMEM to be something that is on the > deprecation list. In this day and age, there is no excuse for running > a 32-bit kernel with lots of physical memory. > > And if you really want to do that, and have some legacy hardware with > a legacy use case, maybe you should be using a legacy kernel. > > I'd personally be perfectly happy to start removing HIGHMEM support again. Do we have a use case where people want to run modern 32-bit guest kernels with more than 896MB of memory to support some horrendous legacy app? Or is our 32-bit compat story good enough that nobody actually does this? (Contrariwise, maybe those people are also fine with running a ten year old kernel because a `uname -r` starting with '3' breaks said app)
