Making World For amd64

[Erik Trulsson]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 04:29:20PM -0500, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> Erik Trulsson wrote:
> 
> >> 1) How does make world know whether to build 32-bit or 64-bit binaries?
> > 
> > It will build for whatever system you have installed.
> > If you are running a 32-bit system it will make 32-bit binaries, and if
> > you are running a 64-bit system it will make 64-bit binaries.
> > 
> 
> 
> By "running", you mean which kernel is booted, I presume.  

No, I mean which variant of FreeBSD you have installed and is using.
Kernel and userland.


> 
> > 
> >> 2) Can a binary from a 32-bit FreeBSD system be run unmodified on the
> >>   64-bit system?
> > 
> > Assuming the 32-bit system is 'i386' and the 64-bit system is 'amd64' then
> > you are supposed to be able to do so (but I don't know how well it works in
> > practice).  Otherwise no.  (Running a i386 binary on a sparc64 system won't
> > work.)
> 
> Right.  I should have been more clear.  It would be unreasonable to expect
> binaries for entirely different machine architecture to run on other
> kinds of machinery.  My question was limited to x86 class machines.

For the most part it helps if you think of amd64 and i386 as entirely
different architectures - because that is essentially how FreeBSD treats
them.

Just about the the only thing that is special (in FreeBSD) about i386-amd64
compared to all other possible architecture pairs is that it is possible
(with a few limitations) to run i386 userland binaries on an amd64 system.
Apart from that you cannot mix and match i386/amd64 any more than you can
with ia64/ppc.




-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se