From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Miller Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 00:53:55 +0000 Subject: Re: Post 1.2 development Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: ultralinux@vger.kernel.org Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:22:09 -0800 From: David Van Beveren 1. What can we expect in the way of a time frame for a peek at 64-bit userland? Are we talking about 1-2 months, 6 months or a year? This is a really critical piece of information for ISVs contemplating porting to UltraPenguin. I believe I told you in private email a few weeks ago that we are currently shooting for some time near mid-summer. But as usual, no promises. That being said, I believe people who are porting applications which have no real need for 64-bits are making a mistake by making a 64-bit sparc version of their application. This is simply because if they make a 32-bit version then the whole sparc line of systems can run that application. The 64-bit userland will be slightly slower for most applications, and this is just a fact of life not anything to do with how our implementation will work (pointers and types are bigger, thus the memory references of the application, even for common tasks, will be larger). 2. What is the outlook for Solaris emulation? Will this always require Solaris shared libs, and a corresponding Solaris license? We have no incentive to work very hard on this, sorry. I really don't want Linux to become a "emulation system" anyways. 3. Has anyone considered tackling the Sun PCi card, the one with the AMD CPU onboard, and scoping out the task of running Win95 on this card under Linux, like Sun does under Solaris? No hardware docs, no access to cards, no chance at support. Actually what would be even more interesting about this piece of hardware would be running Intel Linux binaries on it so one could run x86 Linux applications on such a machine. Later, David S. Miller davem@redhat.com