Charles Wright writes:
> I'm confused by what you mean when you say
> "Most Solaris user space applications are not 64 bit clean"
Many applications we ship are compiled in 32-bit mode because:
- They usually don't require any of the expanded address space or
special features of 64-bit-ness, so compiling specially provides
little or no benefit.
- You need just a single binary; 32-bit applications run on both
64-bit and 32-bit kernels, but 64-bit applications run only on
64-bit kernels.
The source for some applications might not be 64-bit clean, because it
was written decades ago and made assumptions about the sizes of longs
or pointers, which may no longer be true. (It's not unusual, for
instance, to see ancient networking applications that use "unsigned
long" to hold 32-bit quantities. Those become 64 bits wide if
recompile in LP64.)
--
James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
