From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Mosberger Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 19:02:27 +0000 Subject: Re: [Linux-ia64] native ia64 32-bits compile & run on linux-ia64? Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org I think one point that hasn't been made so far is that we actively discourage supporting an ILP32 data model for IA-64 Linux to avoid splitting ia64 linux into two different worlds (32-bit and 64-bit world). If we supported ILP32, it's very likely that some ISVs will decide to provide *only* 32-bit libraries, which could in turn force other ISVs to stay with 32-bit just because they couldn't get the pre-requisite 64-bit libraries. My understanding is that IRIX suffered from this effect. There are times where an ILP32 model would achieve slightly better performance, but it's certainly not always the case and, in my opinion, the potential performance benefit is not worth the cost of having to maintain two data models (ILP32 and LP64). Note that the cost is not just in developing, testing, and maintaining two versions of each library, but also in added complexity for programmers. --david