[Debian-ppc64-devel] Re: 64bit status report : biarch toolchain and ppc64 debian kernel.

[Albert Cahalan]

On 8/19/05, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 22:55 -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> > On 8/18/05, Sven Luther <sven.luther at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> >
> > > That brings us to the next step, what is the best way to get most libraries to
> > > build 64bit packages ? This would need some extensive change in the packaging
> > > stuff probably.
> >
> > As you know, there are two ways:
> >
> > a. Major hacking for each and every package.
> > b. Pure and sane 64-bit system.
> 
> At the expense of performances, disk space, etc... of course

You could apply that logic to the kernel just as well. Even on hardware
without 32-bit capability, an ILP32 model can be used. If it's so good,
why not?

Looking at the whole system, you can save disk space and get
better performance by having only 1 copy of each library stored
on disk, in RAM, and in the CPU's cache. It is thus not at all
certain that a mixed system will be faster than a pure system,
even if 64-bit is inherently slower when compared alone.

I do note that the Itanic-style ABI features look pretty bad. If they
are as bad as they look, then a new ABI should come first.