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Re: ia32-libs{-tools}, multiarch, squeeze



On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 10:28:24AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Last I heart s390 planed to drop 31bit support and go fully 64bit.

This was the plan. However I don't know if it is the best solution. The
fact is: only Debian and SuSE still supports a complete 31bit userland.
RHEL is released 64bit only with some 31bit libs and SuSE have both.
This also means that many of the commercial software is now released as
64bit binaries.

On s390 we have the advantage that we have a lot more operations in
64bit aka zarch mode while using the same opcode format. This includes
things like 32bit immediate loads and, for z9 and newer only, unicode
conversion[1]. So this code can actually be smaller and faster then the
31bit code.

So if we are going to get multiarch support, I would vote for a two
stage plan:
- Do a full 31 and 64bit release for X.
- Reduce the 31bit port to minimal for X+1.
I hope that apt e.g. will be able to do such an upgrade.

Bastian

[1] https://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/s390-assembler,
    https://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/smallest-utf32-to-utf8-converter
-- 
But Captain -- the engines can't take this much longer!


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