Why POWER8 and POWER9 Linux on Power systems not support 32bit application?

android, openembedded (aka yocto), gentoo, and so on, yes. or if you are extremely brave like Libre-SOC: 5+ months NLnet-funded work on rebuilding PowerEL (Fedora/RHEL) and Debian ppc64 and ppc64be for SFFS.

however at some point people go “hang on a minute, why am i as the OEM having all this crap, why are the NREs so high, why are my engineers struggling with all these ridiculous non-upstream-patches placing my product delivery schedule at risk? sod it i’ll go back to ARM”.

(100+ booths - not a single one with anything other than an ARM core):

as an aside: at that event i met Nordic RF (famous for BLE 32-bit ARM SoCs). we discussed and agreed that a reduced binary and data-usage size (automatically inherent from 32-bit binaries but also from upcoming SVP64) would be significantly advantageous for the reduction in power consumption and cost for the customer (smaller RAM, smaller NAND Flash) but what had not occurred to me before was that they have a huge number of customers doing ultra-expensive OTA updates, over 2G GSM, Satellite, at the end of 5+ km RS485 cables and so on.

in Embedded / AI / Edge / IoT, reduced binary size and reduced data usage is important.