Timothy – I don’t personally have any programs that have lots of pointers in memory so that the effect of defeating the cache can be demonstrated. But while ever people are building ELF32 binaries for reasons that they think make sense, I would like to see “truth in advertising” and for gcc to use the “-m32” option to demonstrate that the code itself is 32-bit clean, and for these modules to run as AM64 so that a z/Linux system runs in pure 64-bit mode.
Note that in the future it may even be possible to neuter SAM24/31 in the hardware to ensure that the software is all running cleanly. Or maybe the hardware will allow AM31 to be obsoleted and replaced by AM32. Besides memory caching there are other reasons to produce ELF32 modules, such as potentially being able to run those modules on different 32-bit-only hardware. I don’t think utilities like “sed” should be required to be 64-bit when they don’t go anywhere near exceeding the 4 GiB barrier. Joe – yes, I read the document you sent me, but it only detailed ELF64. BFN. Paul. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
