{"id":112753,"date":"2026-10-02T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=112753"},"modified":"2026-10-03T18:58:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T01:58:56","slug":"20261002-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20261002-00\/?p=112753\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is there no Windows hot-patching support for other architectures like 32-bit ARM and MIPS?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Windows hot-patching supports <a title=\"Why do Windows functions all begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction?\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20110921-00\/?p=9583\"> x86-32<\/a>, <a title=\"Why don't Windows functions begin with a pointless MOV EDI,EDI instruction on x86-64?\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20221109-00\/?p=107373\"> x86-64<\/a>, <a title=\"Windows on AArch64 also provides for hot-patching, but it's much simpler than on x86\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20260930-00\/?p=112744\"> 64-bit ARM<\/a>, and <a title=\"Windows on Itanium also provides for hot-patching, in an even simpler way\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20261001-57\/?p=112747\"> Itanium<\/a>, but why not the other architctures like 32-bit ARM, MIPS, Alpha AXP, PowerPC, and SH-3?<\/p>\n<p>These architectures fall into two buckets.<\/p>\n<p>MIPS, Alpha AXP, PowerPC, and SH-3 all predate hot-patching, so they naturally couldn&#8217;t conform to rules that didn&#8217;t exist yet.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, 32-bit ARM support was introduced\u00b9 to Windows in the Windows 8 era, and at that time, hot-patching had already existed. But there were no provisions for hot-patching 32-bit ARM binaries because hot-patching is a Windows Server feature. Since there was no version of Windows Server for 32-bit ARM, there was no need to support hot-patching on 32-bit ARM binaries.<\/p>\n<p>\u00b9 More accurately, <i>re<\/i>-introduced, since Windows CE supported 32-bit ARM as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They either predate hot-patching or never needed it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-112753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>They either predate hot-patching or never needed it.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112753"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112754,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112753\/revisions\/112754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}