x86-64 distros need to support 32-bit

Posted Jun 13, 2004 10:51 UTC (Sun) by mjr (guest, #6979)
In reply to: x86-64 distros need to support 32-bit by JoeBuck
Parent article: Debian x86_64 port ready

SuSE and Red Hat are shipping multilib'd distros (supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries). They are shipping now; Debian is chasing. It's not a good idea for the chaser to be clearly inferior, and not supporting 32-bit means that you're inferior.

Correct, to an extent and to some user groups. Some users probably don't care significantly (I know I won't), and anyway, it's better to have single-arch amd64 port than none at all. (Not denying that multiarch support will be a good thing when it gets there in a clean way.)

For many apps, 32-bit code will be faster on the Opteron than 64-bit (32-bit tuned code, that is, not the Debian i386 stuff)

Hmh, not sure what you mean by 32-bit tuned code (perhaps hand-written assembly?) but as 64-bit code on the amd64 can access way more general purpose registers and stuff it's likely to be superior to the 32-bit mode in many applications. (This in contrast to eg. sparc32/64, where sparc32 code is often faster, but where the sparc64 code also doesn't have clear advantages besides the larger address space.)

Now, perhaps it's possible for Debian to start out as 64-bit only and cleanly add the 32-bit stuff later. But until this is corrected, people with an Opteron box who aren't RMS-style purists will want to run SuSE or Fedora

Perhaps they will. At least now they can also make a choice whether to use Debian with the caveats, or one of those other systems. To each his own.