On 5/25/18 2:50 PM, Rick Troth wrote:
> Problem is that most people are just not interested. Most people just
> don't care (that we're wasting bytes and maybe a few cycles). When
> building, they don't bother to mark 'sed' (or anything) as "make this
> one 32-bit". It would be extra effort. Or maybe they don't know it's
> possible.

I wouldn't call that a "problem".

> Stand-alone executables can run in either mode without impact on things
> which depend on them (other than that they run faster in 32-bit mode).
> Anyone want a 32-bit statically linked 'sed'? I've got one. Oh ... yeah
> ... that reminds me ... shared linkage. If you want to run 32-bit apps
> /and you don't link them statically/ then you have to ship 32-bit
> runtime support. Bummer.

If you link statically or if you use very few 32-bit programs on a
64-bit system you actually waste memory by having the library code
duplicated in memory.

Debian now made multiarch work and I seem to remember that it's a thing
in the RPM world, too? As long as the arch you are targeting still has
packages available (not the case for the 31-bit s390 in Debian), you can
co-install them on the same system. For binaries you can only have a
single variant installed. For libraries you can co-install multiple
architectures. The latter is actually how I cross-compile for s390x on
an amd64 system. And in theory you could even use qemu's user emulation
mode to run binaries compiled for another architecture.

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

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