Linuxolator on AMD64 Guidance

[Thomas M. Hermann]

Greetings,

Is the goal of current linuxolator development to update support to
2.6.16 to be 64bit on amd64 or just update to 2.6.16 and run 32bit apps
on amd64 as is done now? I've subscribed to freebsd-emulation &
freebsd-amd64, searched through archives of said groups, looked through
the FreeBSD developers wiki, and googled. There is only
sys/amd64/linux32 in the cvs repository. I'm a little confused.

My interest stems from the fact that I rely on the linuxolator to run
engineering applications which are only available on Linux. I've
successfully run the parallel version of LS-DYNA, a FEM pre-processor
called Hypermesh, MSC.Patran, MSC.Nastran and ANSYS. I was most amazed
by the LS-DYNA run, both CPUs were pegged for the entire run. All of
these applications were, obviously, the IA32 versions and performed
beyond my expectations. But, my next computer will be 64bit and I'm
interested in running the 64bit versions of these applications,
primarily due to the memory requirements of the analysis.

In the next 6-12 months, I'm going to be purchasing a new workstation.
At a minimum, I will need to run ANSYS on the workstation. I have no
interest in using Linux or Windows as my primary OS. So my options in
order of preference are:

1) Dual-core Opteron+FreeBSD/amd64+linuxolator/amd64+ANSYS-AMDx64
2) Mac Pro+VMware-Fusion+RHEL+ANSYS-AMDx64
3) Dual-core Opteron+FreeBSD/amd64+linuxolator/i386+ANSYS-IA32

Except that I don't know that option 1 is truly an option or will be any
time soon. Option 3 is least preferable, but would be acceptable if
there was the potential of moving to 64bit within the next 12-18 months.
I went to the ANSYS website today and requested native support for
FreeBSD and Mac, but I'm not holding my breath.

If anyone can provide any guidance, it would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

Tom

-- 
=== Thomas M. Hermann ===