Bastian Blank <wa...@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 10:28:24AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> Last I heart s390 planed to drop 31bit support and go fully 64bit.
>
> This was the plan. However I don't know if it is the best solution. The
> fact is: only Debian and SuSE still supports a complete 31bit userland.
> RHEL is released 64bit only with some 31bit libs and SuSE have both.
> This also means that many of the commercial software is now released as
> 64bit binaries.
>
> On s390 we have the advantage that we have a lot more operations in
> 64bit aka zarch mode while using the same opcode format. This includes
> things like 32bit immediate loads and, for z9 and newer only, unicode
> conversion[1]. So this code can actually be smaller and faster then the
> 31bit code.
>
> So if we are going to get multiarch support, I would vote for a two
> stage plan:
> - Do a full 31 and 64bit release for X.
> - Reduce the 31bit port to minimal for X+1.
> I hope that apt e.g. will be able to do such an upgrade.
>
> Bastian
>
> [1] https://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/s390-assembler,
> https://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/smallest-utf32-to-utf8-converter
> --
I guess that means introducing a full s390x architecture then and
eventually making s390 the partial architecture.
You can start on the first part for squeeze. :)
MfG
Goswin
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