Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 22 Dec 2004 05:59:14 +1100
From:      Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au>
To:        Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com>
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Will there be a 5.3.1?
Message-ID:  <20041221185914.GL79646@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <E1Cgi14-000Bav-2Q@dilbert.firstcallgroup.co.uk>
References:  <6.2.0.14.2.20041219181710.062cde10@localhost> <E1Cgi14-000Bav-2Q@dilbert.firstcallgroup.co.uk>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 2004-Dec-21 11:17:22 +0000, Pete French wrote:
>> I'd really like to see support for the AMD64 architecture become rock solid,
>> too, because 64 bit Athlons are starting to sell at great prices.
>
>Sadly I went back to running i386 on my AMD64's - not because of problems
>with FreeBSD, but because of problems with ports. It seems that theres a lot
>of code out there assuming sizeof(int) = sizeof(long). Which is a shame (and
>also depresses me after living through identical problems with the  16->32
>switch. You might have thought people would heave learnt)

One of the benefits of the AMD64 is supposed to the its ability to
run a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

I recall this being a major problem when I first started working on
DEC Alpha's about 6 years ago but haven't noticed it as much recently.
(Though one project I'm working on started life on PDP-11's and whilst
it's been ported to ILP32, does not like I32LP64).

One problem is that Unix first became popular (outside academia) with
the advent of the 32-bit workstations and then took off with the rise
of Linux on 32-bit i386.  Lots of Unix code has never seen an environment
were sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) == sizeof(void *) isn't true.

Hopefully things will improve in the future.

-- 
Peter Jeremy



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20041221185914.GL79646>