On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 12:55:59PM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Jakub Jelinek (jakub(a)redhat.com) said:
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 09:25:45AM -0800, John Reiser wrote:
> > Actually many of them should be using the new x86_32 software architecture,
> > which is the 64-bit instruction set (thus 16 "general" registers,
SSE, ...)
> > but with integers, longs, and pointers all 32 bits. The upper 32 bits
> > of any user address are 0, and not stored in RAM (except the return address
> > of CALL.) This gives a measurable benefit on boxes with low RAM.
>
> Except that such a model is only barely supported in binutils, the support
> for it in gcc is pre-alpha state on a branch and there is no kernel nor
> glibc support.
Am I missing something, or would this also be binary-incompatible? If so,
that's very very very much not worth the effort.
Yes, it is ABI incompatible, not sure what made hjl start with that now
and trying to push x86_64 into Irixy shape with 3 multilibs instead of 2.
I vaguely remember we've talked about it a decade ago and decided it was not
worth the effort.
Jakub