Re: Cleaning up numbering for new x86 syscalls?

From: Bernd Petrovitsch
Date: Tue Nov 20 2018 - 18:06:30 EST


On 20/11/2018 08:33, Ingo Molnar wrote:
[...]
> 6. Is x32 even used in practice? I still think it was a mistake to add it
> and some significant distributions like Fedora are not enabling it.

x32 works as far as gcc/gas/ld is concerned (at least for compiling
non-trivial programs).
Finding a distribution that actually *delivers* x32 libraries is another
thing (and said non-trivial software uses ATM e.g. libxml2) - at least I
can't find an "x32-Ubuntu".
And no, I don't see a compelling reason to (try to) build the n+1.
architecture for the major distributions.
And yes, lots of stuff will not compile out of the box (especially if
one uses a somewhat sane set of gcc options - not only -Wall -Wextra
-Werror) but if one gets software to compile for i386 and x86_64,
getting it to compile for x32 is a Friday afternoon job (more or less).
And yes, there is enough hardware/systems out there that uses 64bit CPUs
(for whatever reason - if only that one can't get a 32bit CPU for that
board) but will never ever need more than 2-3 GB RAM .....

MfG,
Bernd
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Bernd Petrovitsch Email : bernd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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