Marc MERLIN wrote:
We already have a custom toolchain to build 64 binaries, static or dynamic, and my only requirement for now is to be able to run 64 binaries on them.Static only would be ok initially.
Static is trivial; just put them into a suitable directory in the path. Nothing special required since no library searching will occur.
At this point, I'd be much better off with a single debian 32 bit base pushed to all machines (32 and 64 bits) so that I don't have to maintain two sets of packages. My only requirement for the 64 bit machines is to be able to run custom compiled 64bit binaries on them.
One of my machines is installed and administered as pure 32 bit but it has a 64 bit kernel with 32 bit emulation. There is a chroot that has a full amd64 environment (fully bootable, etc, for easy administration). However, the amd64 environment only exists as a convenient place to inherit libraries and the like for 64 bit applications. Such apps are installed on the 64 bit side, native, and the 32 bit /usr/local/bin has a soft link to a shared script that switches the environment over and execs the 64 bit binary. Yes, I know, I'm lazy. You can do better with having that script be changed into a compiled 32 bit C program that does an in-situ exec() and therefore behaves like a multicall binary.
Can I just steal that and whatever /lib64/libc.so is required from a RH FC3 system, or maybe even some debian source, and be on my way? (that'd be in addition to running your amd64 kernel)
What you might want to do is create local deb packages that contain the static 64 bit package and do a dpkg-divert followed by a soft link if the kernel appears to be 64 bit capable. That will make it easy to push the packages out and administer them centrally across all machines.