On Monday 09 February 2009, Peter Laws wrote:
> Dan Vietor wrote:
> > I'm just now starting to do work in 64 bit space. I've found that
> > most programs that are compiled for 32 bits will run without
> > modification on 64 bit systems. The problem I've found is that
> > there are some issues with backward compatibility of some of the
> > older shared libraries. For example, WXP compiled for 32 bit
> > RHEL3 would not run on 64 bit RHEL5 because of missing 32 bit
> > shared libraries. The 32 bit compile for RHEL5 worked without a
> > problem. I'm researching this backward
>
> That sounds like Sun days of yore (SPARC went 64-bit nearly 15 years
> ago). Remember when the 64-bit version of stuff wasn't always there
> (SUNW....x in the pkg name)?
Yes, it's unfortunate that RH decided to do it the "stupid" way, which
keeps the system from being 99% backwards compatible with 32-bit
programs; who really needs a 64-bit address space version of 'ls'
anyways?
This is one of my reasons that I prefer Debian - all the basic system
libraries are compiled for both 32 and 64 bit, and the number of 64-bit
libraries keep expanding... at least with Linux/OSS you can compile the
needed 64-bit libraries yourself, unlike the proprietary bits in UNIX.
Now if just everyone else would follow suit, and switch to doing things
the more sane way, I'd be just a little bit happier. :)
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing -- http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcac
