grub port question

[Henrik W Lund]

Peter Wemm wrote:

>On Thursday 30 September 2004 10:03 am, Rob wrote:
>  
>
>>I was going to try to use grub for booting from my multidisk system,
>>as I was told that the bootup process is done in i386, then it is
>>transfered to 64 bit mode.  So grub works OK.   But last nite I tried
>>to install grub from ports and got the message immediately
>>(paraphrasing) "that I could not compile a 32 bit application on a 64
>>bit OS."
>>
>>So now I'm really confused LOL.
>>    
>>
>
>In a nutshell, the toolchain has various flags/switches to control its 
>operating mode.  For example, gcc has -m32 and -m64.  The catch is that 
>we do not install the 32 bit version of the include files yet.  And you 
>have to use tools/lib32/build32.sh to build the 32 bit libraries.  The 
>rest of the toolchain has various mode switches.  eg: as --32 etc.  gcc 
>could be slightly tweaked to use the correct include and library paths, 
>but for now it needs horrible -I and -L switches.
>
>However, the port problem is that it doesn't know any of these magic 
>options.  I hate to say it, but the easiest thing is probably to just 
>fetch the i386 package for now.  If pkg_add won't do it, then it should 
>be possible to extract the tarball by hand and do the deed.  Not 
>pretty, I know.
>  
>
Greetings!

Will this be resolved for 5.3-RELEASE, or is the problem complicated on 
a deeper level? If not for -RELEASE, will it ever happen in -STABLE? I 
got the impression that one of the developers (I believe it was David 
O'Brien) wanted to see a 64-bit kernel and (mostly) 32-bit world, as 
having a 64-bit world isn't really all that beneficial. This, of course, 
led me to thinking that work is being done to accomodate this in a 
non-hackish way.

Am I way off the mark here?

-- 

Henrik W Lund