On 2024/10/17 23:07, Philip Guenther wrote: > On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 2:16 PM Stuart Henderson > <stu.li...@spacehopper.org> wrote: > > On 2024-10-17, Christian Schulte <c...@schulte.it> wrote: > > > > > > I just don't get the point for trying to support 32bit hardware on a > > > 64bit system. If the hardware does not support 64bit but is limited to > > > 32bit, use i386. If the hardware supports 64bit, just don't limit it to > > > 32bit. Does not make sense to me making a 64bit OS support 32bit > > > devices. Of course, there is an upgrade path. amd64 just should fail to > > > boot on any hardware not 100% 64bit capable. For such hardware use i386. > > > Either the hardware is fully 64bit ready, or it is not. In my opinion > > > amd64 should really give up on anything 32bit and should really just > > > refuse to boot non 100% 64bit capable systems at all. > > > > What on earth are you talking about? > > > > Of course you can't run 64 bit versions of OpenBSD on 32 bit hardware. > > No, they're suggesting that amd64 should drop support for hardware > which isn't capable of 64bit DMA addressing.
Ah, that's so unlikely I didn't even consider it possible. Thanks for pointing it out! > I'm not a hardware guy and do not have a real grasp of PCI BARs and > such, but I see a bunch of 32bit BARs in their pcidump output, > suggesting that they're ready to lose at least their AHCI devices > (sd0, oops), em0 ethernet, SD card reader, and some (not all) USB > devices, which are apparently limited to 32bits in at least one way. > > I have a laptop which has only one device which attaches through a PCI > device which has a 32bit BAR: puc0. Maybe they're a visionary, but it > seems the shipped hardware is not...quite...there. Interesting laptop, I bet there aren't many like that. > > > For such hardware use i386. Unless someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, on top of already having no mainstream web browsers that build, it seems likely that i386 will soon lose everything written in rust, or depending on something written in rust. That covers quite some nunber of ports nowadays. Also I am a bit dubious about most larger C++ ports still compiling after the next LLVM update. I think most other OS depend on cross- compiling from 64-bit systems for this now.
