Re: Pure 64 bootloaders

["David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Jim Gifford <maillist@jg555.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 09:33:26 -0700

> David S. Miller wrote:
> 
> >You can make SILO 64-bit, but it would just be a lot
> >of work and would just result in a SILO that, unlike
> >current SILO, would only work on UltraSPARC machines.
> >
> >There really is no advantage, and known disadvantages, to
> >making SILO 64-bit.
> >  
>
> If I have a system that is a Pure64 environment, I try to compile Silo, 
> it will not function. Since there is no support for 32 bit, how would I 
> be able to use it.

You'll need some minimal 32-bit libraries sitting around in order
to build it, sorry.

For performance reasons alone I would _never_ condone a purely
64-bit userland.  It's simply a total lose from a performance
perspective, unlike some other platforms such as amd64 which
eradicate most of the 64-bit performance loss due to the gain
in available cpu registers compared to 32-bit x86.