On Friday 30 April 2004 17:57, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > > an Opteron machine, how x86 is it? I understand it's supposed to be > > fully backwards compatible. does it mean I can just take an x86 regular > > 32 bit kernel and binaries and run on it? is 64bit an option or a must? > > how does it mix? can old 32bit binaries run under a 64bit kernel? IS > > there already a 64bit opteron kernel? > > opterons can fully boot and run 32bit systems.
Indeed. And I believe there's a native 64 bit opertron linux port as well. > > As for mixing 32bit and 64bit: AFAIK you can't mix 32bit and 64bit code > in the same process. Thus a 32bit binary needs a separate set of > libraries. Other than that, it works just as well. Who said you can't mix 32bit and 64 bit in the same proccess? the problem is really quite different: the OS (not the CPU that doesn't care) needs to know in which mode you want the system call to operate. So, you can mix 32 and 64 bit instructions (but you need to be very carefull with pointers and such), however you can't mix system calls in the two "modes" (well, without doing some really weird stuff :-) Cheers, Gilad -- Gilad Ben-Yossef <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Codefidence. A name you can trust (tm) http://www.codefidence.com "I am Jack's Overwritten Stack Pointer" -- Hackers Club, the movie ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
