586 vs 686

[Warren Togami]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Jesse Keating wrote:
>>> No, they're being made to be able to produce those for those reasons.
>>> It is yet to be seen if it will be successful, and using the x86_64
>>> kernel on i586 installs hinges upon this functionality so I recall.
>>
>> AFAIK, Debian has been shipping i386 GCC with -m64 support for ages.  The
>> drawback is that it's slower even when not using -m64 because some 
>> internal
>> types (HOST_WIDE_INT and related stuff) are larger.
> 
> Not true. -m64/-32 cause gcc to switch between multilibs, when using a 
> multilibbed setup. Unless something is broken somewhere, the internal 
> types, library search paths etc. will be set up correctly.
> 

Debian has multilib?

It sounds like a predominantly .i586 system with a x86_64 kernel needs 
to install a minimal x86_64 multilib toolchain in order to build x86_64 
kernel modules?

Some of those installers for more complicated (evil?) kernel module + 
userspace things that people want to build might also want *-devel 
packages to build against.  This spins further and further into silly.

They might as well convert their system to be real x86_64 because it is 
a growing hassle.  We also don't want to dump an arbitrary amount of 
x86-64 userspace into the i586 repo to support arbitrary unsupported 
things that people may want to do?

Anyway, I'm making a few assumptions.  I've never actually tried this.

Warren