Debian on AMD64 [LWN.net]

Debian on AMD64

Posted Dec 2, 2004 13:22 UTC (Thu) by sdague (subscriber, #7731)
Parent article: Debian on AMD64

Although there is some interesting information in this article, the use of Debian as a test platform seems really odd. SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake, and Gentoo all have had support for a lot longer, and don't require chroots to run 32bit packages. The coexistance of 64bit and 32bit runtimes in the main environment isn't *dirty*, it is one of the key advantages of this platform.

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Debian on AMD64

Posted Dec 9, 2004 21:47 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

The problem with Debian is that it does not yet have the infrastructure for
dealing with several architectures/ABIs in the same installation. The
first Debian attempt at an AMD64 port was the biarch port, but with the
lack of infrastructure, it eventually stalled.

So around January the pure64 port that was not intended to support the
i386 architecture gained impetus. And of course there you have to use
tricks or chroot to run i386 (32-bit) binaries.

Technically, the difference is that other distributions put the 64-bit
libraries in /lib64 and 32-bit libraries in /lib , while Debian pure64
puts the 64-bit libraries in /lib. Now if you want to install a
32-bit library on pure64, it will likely collide with the 64-bit
library in the same place. That's why Debian users would consider
that dirty, and recommend using a chrooted 32-bit environment instead.

As for me, I bought an Athlon64 a little over a year ago, and wanted
to install Debian. After failing to install biarch (I deserved that,
I wanted to cut corners:-), I saw that Debian was headed in the pure64
direction, decided that I wanted to run 32-bit binaries without
chroot, and installed Fedora Core 1 in March, and have been pretty
happy with that since.

Debian on AMD64

Posted Dec 12, 2004 3:08 UTC (Sun) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link]

From what I've read on the mailing lists, the biarch port was stalled because they resolved to move in favour of a multiarch approach which would solve the problem in a cleaner way that should involve less breakage, and permit more than 3 ABIs on the one architecture. All this proposed for after the release of sarge, of course. See:

http://raw.no/debian/amd64-multiarch-3 (current multiarch proposal)
http://www.linuxbase.org/~taggart/multiarch.html (description of what the filesystem layout would look like)
http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2004/07/msg00175.html (biarch vs multiarch)
http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2004/05/msg00285.html (another succinct but informative thread about pure64/biarch/multiarch)