Re: [Ksummit-discuss] 2038 Kernel Summit Discussion Fodder

From: Ben Hutchings
Date: Tue Aug 12 2014 - 22:07:19 EST


On Tue, 2014-08-12 at 17:01 -0700, John Stultz wrote:
[...]
> The downsides here are many. The distros will probably hate this idea,

I certainly hate the idea of adding another 32-bit port to Debian.
I think that it's OK for traditional distros to say 'just upgrade to
64bit' while you solve the problem for 32-bit embedded systems where
there's probably little demand for supporting multiple ABIs at once.

> as it requires rebuilding the world, and maintaining another legacy
> architecture support. Iâm also not completely sure how robust
> multi-arch packaging is in the face of having to handle 3-4
> architectures on one system.

dpkg multiarch covers this just fine, while I believe RPM is limited to
biarch.

> On the kernel side, it also adds more complexity, where we have to add
> even more complex compat support for 64bit systems to handle all the
> various 32bit applications possible.
[...]

Didn't we need to do this already to support x32? Have compat ioctls
involving time been botched?

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
Humans are not rational beings; they are rationalising beings.

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