pure64 Hoary

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 12:53:00PM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:

> The user concerned said he had 32 bit compatibility libraries installed,
> yet for some reason the version of libcrypto in /usr/lib appeared to not
> be 32 bit. I was under the impression that 64 bit libs went in /usr/lib64
> and the linker would automatically choose the right one. Am I wrong? Is
> that Fedora specific?

I'm not sure about many other distributions, but this is not the way that
Ubuntu/amd64 works.  The system is 64-bit native, so /usr/lib contains
64-bit libraries.

> Ryan pointed me to this page:
> 
>   http://digital-conquest.ath.cx/wiki/index.php/Ubuntu
> 
> which talks about "pure64" systems, a term I've never seen before.

That is a term which is used in some circles, to distinguish between a
32-bit native system with some 64-bit programs, and a native 64-bit system.

On some 64-bit architectures, it is desirable to run mostly 32-bit code,
because it provides better performance.  However, this is not the case on
amd64 systems, so we run everything 64-bit.

> It seems to imply that a pure64 system can actually have 32 bit
> compatibility libraries installed, which doesn't sound very pure to me,
> but there doesn't seem to be a good source of information on how 64-bit
> binaries are being deployed in the Linux community. At least, I was unable
> to find one and the Ubuntu Wiki doesn't seem to have a page specifically
> for it. Does anybody know of a page which explains how the 32/64
> sideloading system works?

The ia32-libs package provides 32-bit compatibility libraries for amd64 (and
ia64).  I'm not aware of any documentation about 32-bit compatibility in
Ubuntu; since you are researching this issue, perhaps you would be willing
to work with the documentation team to provide a technical foundation for
such documentation?

-- 
 - mdz