On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Jens Olav Nygaard wrote: > Please bear over with me if this has been pointed out before... > > I'm running LFS+BLFS (fairly recent stuff, Jan 05) on an Intel P4 thingy. > Now I'm awaiting a shiny new AMD X2 in the mail. My question is > this: What is the best (=most sure to succeed with stable results) way to > get a 64 bit LFS running? >
At the moment, the "most sure" was is probably to install a 64-bit distro. So far, there are no _recent_ x86_64 instructions that I'm aware of for building from an x86 host. In LFS terms, "best" means maximising the learning, but it depends how long you can spare. Ignoring _how_ you are going to install, you need to consider what sort of result you want - my experience is that browser plugins (RealPlayer in my case, but also flash) need a multilib system so that they can link against 32-bit libraries (RealPlayer needs the gtk/atk/pango trinity, and when you work backwards this implies a 32-bit X and libpng (you can overwrite the 32-bit X _programs_ with a later 64-bit build). Similarly, the common bootloaders are 32-bit (I think Chris Lingard patched lilo or one of its dependencies to build on a 64-bit host, but I could be wrong). Obviously, you can install the bootloader from a 32-bit host, but long-term that's not a viable solution. After you've (hopefully) got LFS installed, you'll want to build whatever blfs packages you use. If the 32-bit stuff is in /lib and 64-bit in /lib64, you'll need to take care (as well as jumping through some minor hoops) - I hope to post some initial comments about specific packages on blfs-support in the next few days. From a BLFS perspective, using /lib for 64-bit would undoubtedly be easier (and on 86_64 there is no reason to build 32-bit for your normal applications, the additional registers mean there is no significant size penalty, unlike e.g. ppc64 where kernel maintainers use a mostly 32-bit userspace). But putting the 32-bit stuff into /lib32 means patching at least some of the toolchain. I'm fairly sure Ryan's cross-lfs scripts have got something for this, but it was only near the end of my last test build that I realised what a pain compiling to /lib64 can be in blfs. So far, I haven't managed a successful x86_64 build without Ryan's scripts, and even hacking Ryan's scripts to look nearer LFS-6.1 gave me a somewhat broken result, mainly because I don't grok everything in the scripts. But, it's a learning experience [ spoken through gritted teeth ;) [ Ken -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
