On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Manoj Joseph <Manoj at sun.com> wrote: > Moinak Ghosh wrote: > >> (2) "Provide support for AMD64 in BeleniX. This involves modifying the > >> LiveCD build to also build another miniroot that support the AMD64 > kernel." > >> > > > > Continuing on my earlier reply maybe it makes sense to make the 64Bit > > live version a DVD image. > > Or maybe a '64 bit only' version of the CD??
Not really practical. On OpenSolaris the 64Bit approach is handled differently from Linux for eg. OpenSolaris delivers a full 64Bit kernel and system libraries however most of the userland apps, utilities and tools are 32Bit only. That is the kernel running in 64Bit mode can simultaneously and transparenty support both 32Bit and 64Bit applications. This is because not all applications benefit from being 64Bit on current hardware and also to retain backwards compatibility. Even 32Bit apps benefit just by being run in a 64Bit kernel. 64Bit support in apps is done where it makes sense. For eg. the JVM is 64Bit, X11 Server is 64Bit to address very large framebuffers, Virtual Machines like VirtualBox are 64Bit, system observability tools are 64Bit, scientific apps can be 64Bit etc. See: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/faqs/64bit.xml http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/devel/assembly/816-5138.pdf (Solaris 64Bit Developers Guide) All this means that in a 64Bit livecd you can omit the 32Bit kernel components but must retain all 32+64Bit userland stuff for the mixed mode operation. This increases space requirements. BeleniX 0.7 does include all the 64Bit components but they are kept extremenly compressed inside the archive.7z. This is a 7Zip, LZMA compressed solid archive using the Ultra compression mode that does a mind-boggling amount of compression even for ELF binaries. This archive is extracted upon harddisk install so the installed version boots with a 64Bit kernel if the hardware is 64Bit. Regards, Moinak. > > -Manoj > > > > _______________________________________________ > belenix-discuss mailing list > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/belenix-discuss > http://groups.google.com/group/belenix-discuss >
