On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 11:27:20PM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote: > On Nov 09, Daniel Schepler <dschepler@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I've asked a couple people in private mail about this, and haven't > > gotten any answer, so I thought I'd ask here for ideas. Where would > > be a good place to upload what I have so far from bootstrapping an x32 > > port of Debian? > Nowhere, until we decide if and how we want to use x32. > IIRC there was some agreement that if we decide to support x32 it should > be as a partial architecture. That'd make it mostly worthless. If you need to co-install amd64 packages on the same system (but not physical machine!), memory gains are gone. On the other hand, x32 can be pretty nice in, for example, vserver situations: you have tens of fast CPU- and memory-efficient vservers while you have an option of adding an amd64 one. So, x32 would need to have all of the userspace. Using an amd64 kernel is no different from an i386 system: currently done via a duplicate package, could be done via a minimal use of multiarch. If this is what you mean by "partial architecture", then we're not in disagreement. Speed gains are far better than armel->armhf, at least for i386. Gains compared to amd64 are limited to pointer-heavy code, said to be up to 30%. If Daniel could upload his work somewhere, we'd be able to test this ourselves instead of relying on some random benchmarks. On the other hand, widespread dumb-ass assumptions about i386/amd64 may cause quite a bit of issues: basically any Makefile that talks about "x86" is somewhat suspicious. This is the main reason one may want to oppose the inclusion of x32 in Debian, IMHO. -- How to squander your resources: those silly Swedes have a sauce named "hovmästarsås", the best thing ever to put on cheese, yet they waste it solely on mere salmon.
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