[Debian-ppc64-devel] Status of debian ppc64?

[Andreas Jochens]

On 05-Mar-08 13:08, Sven Luther wrote:
> No, i believe you are wrong, or partially so at least. I mean, it may have
> changed in the last few month, but last this was discussed, both redhat and
> suse where taking the biarch approach, while gentoo goes the pure-64bit
> approach.

What exactly do you mean by 'biarch approach' vs. 'pure-64bit approach'?
I guess that the term 'pure-64bit approach' comes from the amd64 case.
The Debian amd64 'pure64' port started with a setup and toolchain which 
was not able to produce 32 binaries. But this is history. 
Since a long time the Debian amd64 port has a 'biarch' toolchain 
which can produce 32 bit binaries and 32 bit binaries and libraries 
run without problems on the amd64 'pure64' port. 

The ppc64 port on alioth also uses a biarch setup and toolchain. 
32-bit binaries and libraries will run fine.

> > The Debian ppc64 port on alioth is quite similar to the ppc64 ports of
> > the other major distributions. One minor difference between RedHat/Suse 
> > on one side and Debian/Gentoo on the other is that RedHat and Suse 
> > put native 64-bit libraries in '/lib64' and 32-bit libraries in '/lib', 
> > while Debian and Gentoo put native 64-bit libraries in '/lib' and
> > 32-bit libraries in '/lib32'.
> 
> Exactly what i was saying, the only difference is the extent of the 64bit
> rebuilds. 
> 
> But then, again the IBM ppc64 folk tell me that there is a slight performance
> hit in running 64bit userland if it is not necessary, and i wonder what you
> reply to this ? 

It is too early to confirm or reject this. I only made some very 
non-scientific tests with the standard tools and with compilations.
In these prelimiary test, I could not detect any significant differences.
Do you have any detailed numbers or specific tests that I could run to
verify this?

Regards
Andreas Jochens