On 2014-07-08, at 10:19, Jim McCarthy <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Jul 2014, Connie Sieh wrote: >>> >>> I note that only X86-64 is available; have I missed something about >>> supported ISAs, or will there also be an IA-32 port/distribution as >>> well? >>> >>> Yasha Karant >> >> TUV is only releasing X86-64 . >> >> -Connie Sieh > > Is this for TUV "v7 ALPHA", or is this to become 'the new normal' going > forward ? > > If no more IA-32 support, what would it take to convince the binutils (?) > development powers-that-be to make available for X86-64 the ld linker option > "-taso" (truncated address space option). Back in the day [1], this option > existed on Red Hat Linux for DEC Alpha, and the net effect on that 64-bit > machine was to create an executable in which memory addresses were > restricted to the lower 32-bits of address space. Legacy source code that > used 32-bit (4-byte) integers as pointers to memory addresses could > therefore be compiled (in gcc, the "-Wl,-taso" option would pass "-taso" > along to the linker), built, and run on the 64-bit machine, albeit without > taking advantage of the additional memory address space available on the > 64-bit machine (e.g., the DEC Alpha processor family). > > Most unfortunately, the ia64 (Itanium) binutils ld linker never had this > feature that appears to have withered away with Linux for DEC Alpha, nor has > the X86-64 binutils ld linker had this feature either. So in my case I've > been hanging onto IA-32 as my SL platform-of-choice. But if IA-32 is no > longer going to be offered, might there be value in resuscitating the > "-taso" option for the linker in X86-64 ? From my perspective this only has > an upside, for those that want/need it ... is there a hidden downside I > don't see ? The toolchain builds ia32 executables (gcc -m32 , ld -m elf_i386). And unlike ia64, x86_64 runs them without performance penalty. -- Stephan Wiesand DESY - DV - Platanenallee 6 15738 Zeuthen, Germany
