Ports and 64-bit Processors

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 10:44:10AM -0400, FreeBSD Questions wrote:
> FreeBSD has supported 64-bit architectures for a while now...  Alpha
> and UltraSPARC come to mind--even if Alpha is no longer a Tier 1
> architecture.  I'm surprised to hear so many of you say that certain
> ports are broken on AMD64.  

AFAIK, it is not as much a question of ports being broken, but there are
some ports that have 'ONLY_FOR_ARCHS=i386' set, e.g. because they are
binary-only ports (e.g. flash plugin, nvidia driver) or because they
contain i386 assembly code or because the code contains assumptions that
are true on i386 but not on amd64 (like the size of a pointer being
equal to the size of an integer).

To see which ports are restricted to certain architectures, try the
following command:

find /usr/ports -type f -name Makefile -exec grep -H ONLY_FOR_ARCH {} \;|less


> I would think if they worked on other 64-bit processors they'd work on
> AMD64.  Were the ports that are broken on AMD64 also broken on those
> other architectures, too?

-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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