From owner-freebsd-amd64@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 27 15:58:45 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 378E216A4CE for ; Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:58:45 +0000 (GMT) Received: from daemon.mistermishap.net (167-49.nyc.dsl.access.net [166.84.167.49]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6A26E43D1D for ; Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:58:44 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from rob@hudson-trading.com) Received: from daemon.mistermishap.net (localhost.mistermishap.net [127.0.0.1])j0RFwhkJ046610 for ; Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:58:43 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from rob@hudson-trading.com) Received: from localhost (rob@localhost)j0RFwhIf046607 for ; Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:58:43 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: daemon.mistermishap.net: rob owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:58:43 -0500 (EST) From: Rob Watt X-X-Sender: rob@daemon.mistermishap.net To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20050127100818.M46092@daemon.mistermishap.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: 32-bit binary compatibility on 5.3-amd64 X-BeenThere: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the AMD64 platform List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:58:45 -0000 Hi, My company is considering buying a number of emt64 or opteron machines. We have been doing some testing so that we can determine the benefits and the pitfalls of the new machines/architectures, and so that we can also determine what we need to change about our build system to have our applications run most effectively on both i386 and amd64 freebsd. I've read a number of posts and bug reports that relate to compiling/running 32-bit applications on amd64 (for example: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/2005-January/003236.html), and they seem to suggest that binary compatibility is supported, but still needs a bit of work. I've run the /usr/src/tools/lib32/build32.sh script, and applied some other changes that people have reccomended, but basically our 32-bit applications all segfault when run on the amd64 machines. Before we put much more effort into running 32-bit apps, I would like to know if it's worth doing now? Should we wait for the support to be fleshed out, and if so is there a timeline for full 32-bit support? Obviously we can have 2 completely different builds of all of our apps, and that is something that we are considering, but we would prefer if we only had to compile our high-performance apps for amd64 and could just run everything else 'as-is'. Can anyone comment on the state of 32-bit support and offer any advice or experience on the matter? thanks, - Rob Watt