Re: Multilib and Linux.

[Jakub Jelinek <jj at sunsite dot mff dot cuni dot cz>]

> I suppose it's slightly grey in the case that both instruction sets are
> "native", but it's basically a completely different toolchain, so
> -m(merced|ix86) doesn't make much sense to me..

I think it shouldn't be hard to compile binutils which support both merced
and ix86 within the same binaries (of course, once merced support is in),
plus the gcc driver could be tought to use two different versions of the
compiler (in fact, that's what we do currently in our distributions, because
egcs-cvs has been unstable to compile 64bit kernels, so we picked up a egcs
which worked best for 64bit and chose another gcc for 32bit stuff and gcc
driver in addition to supporting -B option chose the default based on
whether -m64 or -m32 or none of these were specified).
I think it is really grey case, as both ISAs are native to the processor,
but provided ix86 runs really fast on merced it is not obvious whether you
want all programs 64bit, at least it is not obvious on sparc64, because of
the larger cache footprint of the 64bit applications.
So I think it would really help to have both ISAs natively supported, not as
a cross-compilation.

Cheers,
    Jakub
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Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
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UltraLinux  |  http://ultra.linux.cz/  |  http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.2.5 on a sparc64 machine (3958.37 BogoMips)
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