New Release

Paul Allen pallen at donut.ugcs.caltech.edu
Thu Apr 14 13:58:45 PDT 2005


IMO, amd64 is appealing to the market precisely because of
its support for 32-bit emulation while the processor is in
64 bit mode.

This is something that the linux guys have gotten all
bolted into place, at least in the kernel--as usual not
all of the distributions agree as to where 32-bit and 
64-bit versions of the userland libraries belong.

It's really very disappointing that FreeBSD barely supports
running 32-bit binaries.  Moreover it does not support
building 32-bit binaries.  The 64-bit is great and all but
there simply aren't the resources for my group to make all 
of our applications 64-bit clean.

Incidentially, anyone considering putting amd64 support in
dfly should be aware that when Sun first ported to 64-bit
they stuck with a largely 32-bit userland.

You should also have a definite plan for how to handle the
system having both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of libraries
(including how any packaging system would support this
dicohotomy).

Maybe the people working on adapting pkgsrc can speak on
this issue...

just my two cents,

paul





More information about the Users mailing list