Re: [PATCH] /proc/sys/kernel/pointer_size

David S. Miller
2003-01-08T23:03:04Z

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 15:04:05 -0800 (PST)

System binaries match the kernel. It's as easy as that. So what if 90% of
the user binaries use 32-bit mode because it's smaller and faster? We're
talking about a system binary that is _very_ intimate with the kernel.

oprofile can perfectly legitimately be used to monitor 32-bit binaries
running on under a 64-bit kernel environment. In fact I expect such
exercises to be very instructive. Anton Blanchard has done this
already on ppc64.

And being that 64-bit sparc systems run several orders of magnitude
faster than 32-bit ones, I think I'd prefer to oprofile 32-bit
programs on sparc64 boxes :-)

Hey, if this is so distasteful we could just add a
sys_kernel_pointer_size() to sparc64 and ppc64 and be done with it.
The other choice, as mentioned, is to make every platform use u64's
in the tables.