Raul Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 09:18:39PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> Fact of life: amd64 boxen are going to be very common.
>> Fact of life: for very large subset of debian userland, pure64 works and
>> on these boxen it works better than debian/i386.
>
> I'm disputing this. So far, I offer as evidence the fact that 32 bit
> userland has been a crucial element in amd64's success. So far as counter
> evidence, I'm getting handwaving and "that's not how I built my machine".
The fact that amd64 can run 32bit i386 code and 64bit amd64 code means
that people (as in home users) can still use their windows and still
play their games while on the other hand they can benefit from the 64
bit extension as support for it comes along.
That makes it such a great choice to upgrade.
For debian we have support (on alioth) that completly switches over to
64bit. You could say the transition from 32bit to 64bit is already
completed for us.
Looking at it from another side: Debian has full support for amd64 and
some (growing) support for the ia32 32bit extension to the 64bit
core. That support is unfinished and not going to be much improved
before sarge+1. Does that slightly reversed look make it clearer?
>> Fact of life: multiarch is vapour and will not be usable for quite a while.
>
> I'm talking about 64/32 bit userland -- which is something other
> distributions already offer.
>
> That's not vapor.
Most of that is also present on pure64. The one big difference is that
pure64 does not support compiling for ia32 without a chroot or
selfbuild compiler.
>> Care to explain how not having any 64bit userland would be better?
>
> It'll be a lot easier to support 64/32 bit userland this way.
>
>> > > It currently looks like ia32 will be replaced by amd64/ia32e as both
>> > > AMD64 and intel are changing the products and adding the
>> > > 64-bit extension does not seem to be very expensive for the CPU
>> > > manufacturers.
>> >
>> > Agreed. And, Debian's amd64 currently isn't positioned to be useful in
>> > this sense.
>>
>> In which sense? Given an amd64 box (and that's not up to you), having
>> that beast is better than not having it. If nothing else, i386 with
>> amd64 kernel and pure64 in chroot is *obviously* better than i386 alone.
>
> In the sense of sane a straightforward 32+64 bit environment.
>
> I have an amd64 box -- that is indeed up to me.
>
> I've got 64+32 bit userland because my toolchain (binutils+gcc+libc)
> was built that way.
That is work in progress and while we lag behind other archs there we
intend to make a giant leap with multiarch overtaking all other archs
by miles (once sarge is out of the way).
> --
> Raul
MfG
Goswin
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