Ubuntu and AMD64

[Tollef Fog Heen]

* "Chris Jones" 

| On Fri, October 15, 2004 17:17, Tollef Fog Heen said:
| > I really want to have a multiarch solution for those things, rather
| > than having to special-case packages like we've done with the
| > Openoffice.org packages as it takes a fair amount of time and doesn't
| > scale well at all.
| 
| I've seen mention of biarch and multiarch since I started using Fedora
| x86_64... what exactly is it? (in the context of Ubuntu, especially).

The ability to run (and optionally create) executables for a foreign
architecture (and/or OS) in a somewhat sane way.  One instance is
running i386 binaries on amd64, another (which won't happen for
ubuntu, since we don't support mips) is the support for O32, N32 and
N64 calling conventions on mips.  Those architectures are
binary-incompatible, but supported through kernel and/or hardware
emulation/support.

If you're interested in some of the technical details surrounding
this, http://raw.no/debian/amd64-multiarch-3 and
http://www.linuxbase.org/~taggart/multiarch.html are good starting
points.

| Is the plan to just add more stuff to ia32-libs? That doesn't look
| especially scalable either (I'm just grabbing the source package now...
| ouch ;)

No, we really don't want to have anything resembling ia32-libs around,
but apt (and dpkg) for i386 should rather be able to install the i386
openoffice with the needed libraries (through normal dependencies).
This needs two things to happen: No file collisions (which means libc6
for i386 and libc6 for amd64 need to have no overlapping files, and
any files which both need will have to be split out into its own
package), and a sane way for the packaging system to handle this,
including a good user interface.

| If I'm going to get mplayer going I'd rather do it in a way that's useful
| than not, so if you point me in the right direction I'll see what I can
| do.

multiarch is somewhere a bit into the future, so I wouldn't worry
about that for now. :)

If you want to discuss this further, I think ubuntu-devel may be more
appropriate. :)

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-