On 06/23/2016 07:54 AM, Alex McWhirter wrote: > I spend most of my time working on pure 64 bit sparc linux. simply because > that's where all the work is currently being done. That being said there are > noticeable speed improvements with some applications being 32 bit.
Where did I say that it is impossible to run 32-bit applications? I never claimed that! > As far as I know Debian doesn't really have a way of managing something like > that.Sure you can compile everything both 64 and 32 bit and install whichever > you > want, but there's no way to really say one package should always be 32 bit > while another should always be 64 bit. Even if that did exist sparc is the > only > architecture I'm aware of that would really benefit from it. Except that Debian has the best mechanism to resolve that which is called Multi-Arch. You can install libraries and binaries of *any* architecture onto *any* machine. In fact, I am doing that to cross-compile things like GHC, see: > https://wiki.debian.org/DebianPorts/BootstrappingGHC > Gentoo also suffers from the same issue although its not as bad onsidering > you can switch ABI's on the fly. Debian isn't suffering from that. Your information is simply wrong. > My unofficial Gentoo ports support multilib for people wanting the best of > both worlds. But making it a seemless experience providing the best > performance based > on each applications needs is something that would take a ton of work. It may > not even be possible with the current packaging system. Multilib alone is an outdated and insufficient concept and the reason why we long had ugly solutions like ia32-libs in Debian which carried 32-bit versions of important libraries repackaged as 64-bit packages. These days, this has become completely redundant since you can just directly install i386 packages on an amd64 system if you need 32-bit support on x86_64, for example. However, it doesn't end there. You can even go further and install i386 packages on a ppc64el machine and run them seemlessly there through qemu-user. Although we are currently missing up-to-date 32-bit sparc packages which you could install on sparc64 via MultiArch (unless you want to use the old ones), there is nothing that stops you from setting up a small mini-dinstall server, set up an sbuild schroot for sparc and build custom packages for sparc instead of sparc64. Thanks to the Debian rebootstrap project [1], we are constantly making sure that bootstrapping sparc on Debian will still be possible if required. The project is still under development, but it's already possible to just cross- bootstrap sparc with current packages on any host architecture. Thus, I don't think any of the objections brought up against the sparc64 port are valid. Neither is sparc64 64-bit only nor does anyone anyhow prevent you in Debian to mix packages from different architectures. In fact, Debian has by far the most flexible approach to resolve the 32-bit/64-bit problem by providing a generic approach for mixing libraries of different architectures. Adrian > [1] https://jenkins.debian.net/view/rebootstrap/ -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - [email protected] `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - [email protected] `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
