From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Subject: Re: 64-bit user-space on G5? Never, soonish, or unknown? From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt To: Mikael Pettersson Cc: linuxppc-dev list In-Reply-To: <16426.14204.974363.611192@alkaid.it.uu.se> References: <16426.14204.974363.611192@alkaid.it.uu.se> Content-Type: text/plain Message-Id: <1076537642.866.127.camel@gaston> Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 09:14:02 +1100 Sender: owner-linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: On Thu, 2004-02-12 at 01:09, Mikael Pettersson wrote: > We're considering buying a G5 for porting a compiler/runtime-system > project to PPC and eventually PPC64. > > The question is, will Linux ever support a 64-bit user-space > on the G5? From my reading of arch/ppc and arch/ppc64, the > differences seem major so I'm not holding my breath, but perhaps > there is hope. > > Or should we just treat the G5 as a faster 32-bitter? > > Or should we use some other OS than Linux :-( There is a 64 bits kernel for the G5, it's currently available on YDL site, though I'll have the whole thing merged with Linus in a few days (with some luck, 2.6.3 will boot out of the box on those in both 32 bits and 64 bits versions). I don't know of a distro that offer 64 bits userland yet, YDL is working on a bi-arch setup, there are SuSE and RedHat distros for IBM p/iSeries though those don't support G5s at the moment, but it may just be a matter of using the right kernel with them and maybe tweaking the installer... And you can always build your own toolchain & glibc :) The 64 bits kernel allow you to run both 32 and 64 bits userland, the common practice is to have a 32 bit userland with the necessary libs to be able to build & run _some_ 64 bits executables. Ben ** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/