Re: sparc64 and sparc architecture -- any consensus?
> > Its not yet planned out, I have just an idea how to lay things out, but need
> > to make linker and glibc changes to make it work (well, the changes are
> > mostly done, but the hard part is to get them accepted).
>
> Last I checked the sparc64 linker is called ld-linux64.so and egcs and
> glibc know about this and are able to distinguish the two at runtime.
Yep, but both 32bit and 64bit glibc will look into the same ld.so.cache, so
e.g. I have to convince Ulrich Drepper about my dynamic linker/ldconfig
patch which makes it possible for different archs of libraries to sit in the
same cache.
>
> I think 95% of what is going to be compiled is going to be sparc32, even
> on sparc64 platforms. Compiling sparc64 should be a conscious thing, not
> something the compiler decides to do on it's own. Default should be
> sparc32 unless passed 64bit flags.
I don't want 64bit userland to be some second class citizen, so IMHO user
should e.g. be able to choose for each package whether he wants 32bit or
64bit binaries from it and definitely compilation for 64bit should be
painless. You in Debian decide what you want in Debian though.
>
> As I said, It's not ready, and it is missing floating point support. I've
> not tested it thoroughly enough, other than checking to see that linking
> the alt paths (/lib64:/usr/lib64) works and it seems to do just that.
Yes, it is there. But you'll have to check zillions of sources to make sure
noone passes -L/usr/lib to gcc, etc. Many configure scripts do.
My idea was that linker has some option which sets more strict ABI checking
(the default is currently to warn about incompatible architectures), while
that option would turn on mode where libraries with incompatible architecture
are skipped in the search path unless no library of compatible architecture
is found.
BTW: /usr/include will be shared, provided that I convince Ulrich to put in
my patch which makes that possible. Also, the kernel is not quite ready yet
for 64bit binaries, there are some (3 of them come to my mind ATM) issues
which need to be solved first.
Cheers,
Jakub
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Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
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UltraLinux | http://ultra.linux.cz/ | http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.2.7 on a sparc64 machine (1343.49 BogoMips)
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