The end of the multiarch era?

Posted Jul 13, 2006 13:57 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501)
In reply to: The end of the multiarch era? by dmantione
Parent article: The end of the multiarch era?

Lastly /lib64 was a very smart choice.

Sorry - that's not true. It's a very limiting choice. It assumes there is only one case where you might want more than one arch present - mixing 32 bit and 64 bit binaries of the same(ish) CPU architecture. The multi-arch concept is much more widely useful than that, as a couple of people have mentioned above, and described in some detail at http://lackof.org/taggart/hacking/multiarch/.

It can help with things like cross-building (somewhere to put target-system binaries (e.g. ARM) needed during the build process which you are going to run using an emulator such as QEMU. Mixing glibc and uclibc, mixing big-endian and little endian code, mxing OS stuff (having some windows programs installed on your linux system), etc. A properly-designed multi-arch system make all sorts of interesting things possible.

Debian is implementing a scheme which allows arbitrary mixes of architectures:

The end of the multiarch era?

Posted Jul 13, 2006 14:14 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

Sure, you can generalize that /lib64 can be improved to random
architectures. It is even a good idea. In the meantime, Debian (and
derivates) is one of the few x86_64 distribution that cannot flawlessly
run x86 binaries. In typical Debian style, it will take years to
develop.

Considering this, /lib64 was a good choice.