On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Bruno Pinto wrote:
Hi guys!
I want to do a LFS. I have an amd 64 bits laptop, so my doubt is if I
should do a multilib 64system, all 64, or like if it was a normal
i386?
Can someone, please, tell me the pros and cons and give me an advice
of what is the best option.
On a machine doing anything useful, the x86_64 code gives gcc a lot more
registers to play with, and is typically 20% faster, but perhaps 20%
bigger. As long as you have a reasonable amount of memory, the extra
space is not usually a problem. But, I have no experience with what
effect (if any) this might have on battery life (bigger data transfers,
perhaps more pressure on cpu cache) for a laptop.
Multilib is extremely educational, but for blfs you *really* need to
understand what you want to build - there isn't a lot of point
persuading a whole set of libraries to build correctly as both -m32 and
-m64 if you don't need them in a particular size (for multilib, the
problems mostly come with building for 32-bit, but people have reported
occasional problems with 64-bit apps finding the wrong libraries or
pkgconfig files or whatever as well. I'll go so far as to say that the
only sensible reason for multilb on x86_64 is to allow the use of 32-bit
binaries (browser plugins, or other binaries). On multilib systems you
have to watch unknown blfs applications to ensure any libraries (or
pkgconfig files) will be installed to /usr/lib64 - a few apps don't
respect --libdir when configured. From experience, if you want to use a
RealPlayer plugin on multilib you can expect some degree of pain when
building the dependencies and when getting a 32-bit pango to sort-of
work in the presence of a 64-bit pango.
Pure64 on x86_64 still has a few things to watch out for, but in
general they also apply to 64-bit builds in a multilib, so you'll be hit
by them anyway (e.g. config.{guess,sub} updates, --disable-fast-malloc
in kde), and they will hopefully show up in a search of the blfs or clfs
archives (well, if clfs is searchable).
If this is your first LFS, doing a straight i686 build will definitely
be easier - if you have the disk space, reserve space for your _next_
system, build a regular LFS, decide what BLFS packages you want, and
keep logs of what they install. Then build a multilib or pure64 system
for the second build.
Ken
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