I spent some time talking with the glibc maintainers about this. These are all my own opinions, but the others seemed to agree with me.
I think this would be a very good idea. On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 09:12:19PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > Hi, > > given the current sarge deadline and the opinions expressed by some of > the release team a full amd64 port in sarge is not going to happen. So > lets move on. > > > What else can we do for amd64 users? > > We have a fully working i386 port which works on amd64 systems too. > What we need most now is support for: > > 1. Kernel support for amd64 to run 32/64 bit binaries > > I want to upload a kernel-image-2.6.7-amd64 to i386. That would be > along the same lines as the sparc64 or s390x kernel image in sparc or > s390 respectively. So nothing new there. Obviously this requires a 64-bit capable GCC first. Other than that I think it's a good idea. > 2. Support to run dynamically linked 64 binaries (e.g. from SuSe/RH) > > What is needed is a /lib64 and /usr/lib64 directory with the core > libraries. There already is a ia32-libs packages doing the reverse for > ia64 and pure64. This just reverses the roles. Again nothing new. I think this is a good idea also. I'm slightly concerned about being able to build them from source but we do have the precedent of ia32-libs. What other distributions have done for this is to also include the source packages for the libraries in question in the source package for the cross-libraries package. I think that would be a better idea, though it's a bit bigger - it's more GPL-obligation-paranoid. > 3. Support to compile 64 bit binaries > > The kernel and libs need to be compiled somewhere. They could be build > on pure64 and uploaded to i386 without problems but it would be nicer > if they could be build under sarge i386 itself. This could be eigther > a cross compiler (like the rest of the cross tool packages) or a 64bit > native compiler. I tend to the later even if that restricts building > those packages to an actual amd64 system. > > Thesource for the toolchain is already in sarge so no GPL problems > even if (3) is scratched. The best thing to do here will be neither a cross compiler nor a 64-bit native compiler. You want a native 32-bit compiler which includes 64-bit support. I can do this. I don't know how we would want to build it; given the freeze it is probably too late to build it from the GCC source package, unless we want to build it from the gcc-3.4 source package (which presumably is not part of base and thus not frozen). Matthias, how do you feel about that? We'd still need a separate source package for binutils or to fix the existing binutils -right now-. That's an extremely low impact change but a separate source package would be even lower impact, so is probably best for Sarge. > So who is willing to sponsor the following packages: > > kernel-image-2.6.7-amd64 > amd64-libs > amd64-libs-dev > gcc-3.3-amd64 > gcc-3.4-amd64 > binutils-amd64 > > None of those are base or standard so there is no "must be today" > rush. But it still needs to be rushed a bit. Do you need gcc 3.3? -- Daniel Jacobowitz
