Some customers are still stuck in a world of 32bit. On ARM64, we have two options for those poor folks:

1) Run applications in the legacy ARMv7 instruction set 2) Compile applications with 32bit, but for the new AArch64 instruction set. This is called ILP32.

The main reason option 1 is a bad idea is that some hardware is already dropping ARMv7 instruction set support. And there will be more to come.

So if we ever want to enable people to run code that is not 64bit safe on AArch64 platforms, we need to provide them with a way out. Hence we should bootstrap at least the bare minimum to enable them to compile their own (broken) code.

Beware that all of this is in a big flux. The interfaces (ABI, syscalls) are not yet set in stone.