The end of the multiarch era? [LWN.net]

The end of the multiarch era?

Posted Jul 14, 2006 7:22 UTC (Fri) by ymmv (subscriber, #4375)
Parent article: The end of the multiarch era?

Multiarch packaging has been a failure even since the double arch Solaris.
The worst was when patches were available for one arch (32bit), and the supposed to be there sparcv9 binaries were not included in the patch.

Your operating environnement was working nicely, but your 64bit application refused to load and run.

Suppose also you have to package some low level library for Solaris (or any other double arch OS): you have to compile it twice, test it twice, with different directory schemes, and then package. A real mess :(

Tru64/Digital Unix/OSF/1 approach of having everything 64bit was much more simple to administer, at the expense of some memory and disk to hold these 64bit binaries. Peanuts nowadays.

So please, keep these free and open OS as mono-architecture.

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The end of the multiarch era?

Posted Jul 14, 2006 11:53 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

All SPARC64 OSes are biarch at least, sorry (even if the 64-bit part is just the kernel, it is still there, and it is often a bit more than that).