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Re: Debian for x86-64 (AMD Opteron)



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On Thursday 10 April 2003 03:46, Philippe Troin wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I definitely prefer everything 64-bit with optionally 32-bit rather
> than the other way around. Otherwise what's the point?

There is a difference between the two questions of where to install
libraries and whether to do a full native port. AFAIK, debian/ia64 
only has a very limited support for i386 packages because it requires
i386 libraries to be installed below /emul/ia32-linux/.

The existing x86_64 (and newer s390x, for that matter) distributions
take a different approach. Native 64 bit libraries are installed
in /lib64 and /usr/lib64 instead of /lib and /usr/lib. This makes it
possible to install all libraries in both variants at the same time.
Applications can obviously be installed only once, but that is what
is desired anyway. The scheme is consistant with LSB and is the only
one that provides full binary compatibility with Debian/i386 _and_
RPM packages from other distros.

We should definitely do a port of all packages to native 64 bit, but
in the process of doing so, we can use any i386 packages that are
not yet ported.

	Arnd <><
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