On Mon, 2012-11-26 at 19:51 -0800, Kyle Brennan wrote: > Hi, > I'm not sure that this is the right mailing list, but I'm going to throw > this out there anyways. > > I've got a few questions about building LFS on a 64 bit host and how > multilib works. > > 1. What exactly is multilib? (I've googled, wikipedia'd etc and I'm still a > bit confused) from my understanding, it's simply an additional set of > libraries that will allow for a system to interpret both 32 bit and 64 bit > machine code.
That's pretty much it - multilib means having two sets of libraries, one 32-bit, one 64-bit. Normally, the latter would be primary - i.e all the executables are linked to the 64-bit versions, the 32-bit libraries being present only for running 32-bit executables. And that, of course, is the only reason to do multilib - you have a application that's only available as a 32-bit binary, no source code. E.g Skype, where no 64-bit binaries are available, and nor is the source code that would let you build your own. You *can* run that on a 64-bit distro, but only by dragging in a tonne of extra 32-bit packages to make it work. > > 2. I'm building on a 64 bit system, if I follow the book exactly, would this > build yield a 32 bit or 64 bit system? It's whatever the host distro is, so if you're running a 64-bit host, you'll get a 64-bit LFS. One caution though - when we say 64-bit, we're talking about the software, not the hardware. A 32-bit host running on 64-bit hardware still gives you a 32-bit LFS. > > 3. if the answer to question one is 64 bit, is this automatically a multilib > system or are there additional steps that will pave the way to multilib? Nope, multilib is quite a bit more complicated. The CLFS folks are probably the best ones to ask about that. > 4. can I use the LFS book to create a 32bit system on a 64 bit OS? (I'm > assuming that the book for this would be CLFS though) Not by following the book to the letter. If the host is multilib and has 32-bit versions of everything the book depends on, I suppose it'd be possible with a few changes. But it'd be much easier to boot a 32-bit host (perhaps in a VM), and build it from there. Simon.
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