Re: Debian for x86-64 (AMD Opteron)
On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 09:58:04PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
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> On Wednesday 09 April 2003 18:38, Daniel Whelan wrote:
> > I noticed some discussion regarding Debian on x86-64 back in January,
> > but haven't seen much since then. I'm interested in seeing this project
> > completed successfully (my department is primarily a x86 Linux and Sparc
> > Solaris shop for servers), and I'd like to look into x86-64 for compute
> > clusters.
> >
> > At any rate, what is the status of this? Is hardware the only thing
> > we're waiting for?
>
> I have done some work back then in order to start x86_64 as a subarchitecture
> of i386, similar to how s390x and sparc64 work. I had some problems running
> in Bochs and the announcement that the Athlon64 release has been delayed
> made it less interesting.
>
> Note that the x86_64 is special: It would be relatively easy to bootstrap
> a port on the actual hardware, but doing it right requires changing _all_
> library packages as well as many other packages. The problem is that
> we want binaries to be compatible with i386 as well as with other x86_64
> distributions and that requires the installation of both 32 and 64 bit
> libraries at the same time.
IMO, the right way is just like ia64 is doing. 64bit userspace with an
ia32 subarch installable. Best part about this is that you can use
almost everything ia64 is doing already. In fact, if dpkg could support
ia32 packages as a subarch for ia64 and x86_64, the packages could be
installable on both as-is.
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