[RFC] what to name linux 32-bit compat

[Brooks Davis]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 12:38:18PM -0800, David O'Brien wrote:
> [ Respect the Reply-to:! ]
> 
> /usr/ports Linux 32-bit compatibility on AMD64 is a mess and too rough
> for what is expected of FreeBSD.  Anyway...
> 
> We need to decide how to have both Linux i686 and Linux amd64 compat
> support live side-by-side.  At the moment my leanings are for
> /compat/linux32 and /compat/linux.  We could also go with /compat/linux
> and /compat/linux64 <- taking a page from the Linux LSB naming convention
> (ie, they have lib and lib64).
> 
> Linux 32-bit support is most interesting -- that is how we get Acrobat
> reader and some other binary-only ports.  The only Linux 64-bit things we
> might want to run that truly matter 32-bit vs. 64-bit is Oracle and
> IBM-DB2.  For other applications 32-bit vs. 64-bit is mostly a "Just
> Because Its There(tm)" thing.  So making Linux 32-bit support the
> cleanest looking from a /usr/ports POV has some merit.
> 
> What do others think?

The argument of making 32-bit linux compat easier seems somewhat
compelling, but I'm also not sure that taking this path isn't a sure
way to will make eventual 64-bit linux support even more painful.  I
disagree that databases are the only real applications of 64-bit.  There
are plenty of Mathematica and Matlab users who would like to solve very
large problems that won't fit in 2GB.  Even without the address space,
the extra registers are supposed to make many calculations much faster
so may compute bound applications are likely to benefit.

-- Brooks

-- 
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