Can I have a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userland ?

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Fri, 7/24/09, john wendel <jwendel10 at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: john wendel <jwendel10 at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: Can I have a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userland ?
> To: sberg at mississippi.com, "Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora." <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Date: Friday, July 24, 2009, 8:34 PM
> On 07/24/2009 08:35 AM, Steve Berg
> wrote:
> >> On 07/24/2009 12:53 AM, Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> >>> john wendel wrote:
> >>>> Anyone have a simple recipe for building a
> Fedora system with a 64-bit
> >>>> kernel and only 32-bit applications?
> >
> >> I tried it, using the kernel from my F10 64-bit
> system on a F11 32-bit
> >> box. No luck. I suspect that the initial ramdisk
> was the problem.
> >
> > Ok, I haven't tried this but I think my first attempt
> would be to install
> > a 64-bit system with a bare minimum of packages. 
> Then install all the
> > userland applications from the 32-bit repos.
> 
> Sounds sensible to me. I'll try it this weekend.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John
> 
> -- 

It is possible, but certain things don't work.  But you will gain in memory and other issues.  I saw a thread in slax forum regarding an x86_64 kernel to boot in slax (compiled in kongoni linux distro).  Users appear to be happy and say that it works.  Kernel is moving rapidly, Just got patch-2.6.30.3 and compiled new kernel

[olivares at ET1161-05 ~]$ uname -iprm
2.6.30.3 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64
[olivares at ET1161-05 ~]$

I'll try to do this for four machines, and I am learning a great deal about patching and other things.  Fedora is indeed staying behind with regards to kernels except on rawhide^{1}

Regards,

Antonio

{1} As soon as I get back to school mid to late August, I'll be updating several of my rawhide machines if possible.  That's where I can get a better connection :)