binary portability

binary portability

[Majumder, Rajib]

Hello,

I have some binaries built on a RHEL 3/EM64T platform. Can I directly port them to an RHEL 3/AMD64 platform and run without any issue? 

I know that EM64T and AMD64 are ISA compatible, but there could be some differences in ELF32 between these 2 processor architectures. 

Any input will be appreciated. 

Thanks

Rajib  


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Re: binary portability

[Jan Engelhardt]

>
>I have some binaries built on a RHEL 3/EM64T platform. Can I directly 
>port them to an RHEL 3/AMD64 platform and run without any issue? 
>
That should work just as much as you can run binaries built on an 
x86/pentium4 platform run on x86/athlon-xp, provided you only compiled with 
the features that both processors support.

>I know that EM64T and AMD64 are ISA compatible, but there could be some 
>differences in ELF32 between these 2 processor architectures. 
>
What differences? (Apart from MMXEXT and SSE2,SSE3)

>Any input will be appreciated. 
>

Jan Engelhardt

Re: binary portability

[Alan Cox]

Ar Iau, 2006-06-08 am 12:42 +0200, ysgrifennodd Jan Engelhardt:
> >I know that EM64T and AMD64 are ISA compatible, but there could be some 
> >differences in ELF32 between these 2 processor architectures. 
> >
> What differences? (Apart from MMXEXT and SSE2,SSE3)

There are multiple ISA differences that affect ring 0 (kernel code), but
only one nasty that hit user code with early Intel clones. The early
Intel clones didn't implement the prefetch instructions that are
mandatory in x86-64. This broke a few apps early on but they got
workarounds very fast.

If the code is built for the generic instruction set (as is the case
unless you try very hard) then it should be perfect on both.

Alan

RE: binary portability

[Alan Cox]

Ar Mer, 2006-06-14 am 16:34 +0800, ysgrifennodd Majumder, Rajib:
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks for the clarifications. Just had 1 more question. Can I port binaries built on RHEL 3/Opteron(2.4.21) to SLES 9/Opteron (2.6.5-7.252) and run without any issues?  

Generally speaking - yes. C++ may be trickier in some cases

http://www.freestandards.org/en/LSB

RE: binary portability

[Majumder, Rajib]

Hi,

Thanks for the clarifications. Just had 1 more question. Can I port binaries built on RHEL 3/Opteron(2.4.21) to SLES 9/Opteron (2.6.5-7.252) and run without any issues?  

Thanks

Rajib

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Cox [mailto:alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk]
Sent: 08 June 2006 22:51
To: Jan Engelhardt
Cc: Majumder, Rajib; 'linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org'
Subject: Re: binary portability


Ar Iau, 2006-06-08 am 12:42 +0200, ysgrifennodd Jan Engelhardt:
> >I know that EM64T and AMD64 are ISA compatible, but there could be some 
> >differences in ELF32 between these 2 processor architectures. 
> >
> What differences? (Apart from MMXEXT and SSE2,SSE3)

There are multiple ISA differences that affect ring 0 (kernel code), but
only one nasty that hit user code with early Intel clones. The early
Intel clones didn't implement the prefetch instructions that are
mandatory in x86-64. This broke a few apps early on but they got
workarounds very fast.

If the code is built for the generic instruction set (as is the case
unless you try very hard) then it should be perfect on both.

Alan


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