Multilib and Linux.

[Matthew Kirkwood]

On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, David Miller wrote:

>    > I wonder how a Merced userland is going to work if we wish to
>    > allow people to still compile 32-bit x86 binaries, even though
>    > the instruction set is radically different between the two.
> 
>    Merced running i386 binaries is still stricly emulation, I believe,
>    so I'd see that as cross-compilation, rather than multiple ABIs.
> 
> I think it's still more of a gray area than this.  The x86
> instructions will execute natively on the processor, so in this
> light using your analysis we could say that executing 32-bit Sparc
> binaries on UltraSparc cpus is emulation and that compiling such
> 32-bit Sparc binaries would be cross-compilation. :-)

But it's (probably :) a completely different instruction set, which I
don't think is the case with sparc/sparc64.

Unless I'm missing something, the ABI defines calling conventions, sizes
of basic types, &c., rather than the actual instruction set.

I suppose it's slightly grey in the case that both instruction sets are
"native", but it's basically a completely different toolchain, so
-m(merced|ix86) doesn't make much sense to me..

Matthew.