On 15 September 2013 14:58, David McQuillan wrote: > > The basic aim of ilp32 is to emulate an old 32 bit environment on a new > processor that supports 64 registers and pointers. However that has never > been the real aim, if one was just trying to support old programs there > would be little need for a special compiler option as you'd have the old > compiler. > > The main impetus has been to use less space and get faster running programs. > There is no point having compatible syscalls with the 32 bit emulation > environment even if one is already supporting one for old programs if one > can run the new program in the 64 bit environment. That is just a route to > extra support costs when new features are brought in. The only real > requirements I can see for running in a 64 bit environment is that malloc > and suchlike should restrict the addresses and the 64 bit debugger should > understand 4 byte restricted addresses and ELF not reuse the same ids with > different lengths. The extra facility one would want in the 32 byte program > is that pointers get turned into 64 bit pointer automatically on system > calls and that even if system structures have 8 byte pointers in them only 4 > bytes are loaded and this could be done by having some pointers, or maybe > instead whole structures and procedure declarations, marked as 64 bit type > (or longest supported type say). > > A more complete implementation than just ignoring the high part of the > addresses would be to actually distinguish between the two with warnings > when converting to 32 bit and to actually use the top part of a 64 bit > address even in an ilp32 environment, e.g. for access to a large memory > mapped file where one hadn't restricted it to the 32 bit address space. >
[Please don't top-post on these lists.] It's still not clear exactly what you want, but if you read about the x32 architecture you might be able to say whether that is or isn't what you want. x32 doesn't just "ignore the high part of addresses" because it's ILP32 so there is no high part to be ignored, pointers are 32-bit. > David > > > On 14/09/2013 21:56, Florian Weimer wrote: >> >> * David McQuillan: >> >>> Has there been an implementation or design of a way of representing 64 >>> bit pointers with ilp32 on a 64 bit system? >> >> There's the x32 architecture, but I'm not sure if that's what you >> want. >> >
