In article <86r7qyr810.fsf@elrond.bloomberg.com>,
Chris Morgan <cm@mihalis.net> writes:
> Rich Teer <rich.teer@rite-group.com> writes:
>
>> On Mon, 26 Jul 2004, Chris Morgan wrote:
>>
>> > 64-bit Solaris x86 is due "soon". I find that hard to believe, but I
>> > guess it depends what the meaning of "soon" is in this context.
>>
>> I guess it does! But don't forget that most of the hard "moving to
>> 64-bit" problems have already been solved by Sun's Solaris kernel
>> engineers. With the exception of a few drivers, everything above the
>> "talks directly to the hardware" level is already 64-bit ready, because
>> of the single SPARC/x86 source tree.
>
> I don't think it's that simple. The programming model used for Solaris
> x86 has always been 32-bit and now they are just adjusting it for
> 64-bit. I don't know how Sun handles the conditional compilations, but
> I can well imagine lots of ifdefs that check to see if it's sparc or
> intel and whether it's 32- or 64-bit. If anyone has made mistakes in
> making their code "cross-platform" in this sense, those mistakes will
> only come out now - for example if someone used the fact of it simply
> being intel to choose 32-bit code. Also "Solaris" is much more than
> the kernel, for example the 64-bit mode of Sun's compiler for x86-64
> is by definition newer and less proven (just like the hardware,
> although I'm sure Opteron really is a great product).


You may be forgetting the early Merced port they'd already done.

I doubt that 64-bitness of x86 source is going to be the problem as
much as the low-level stuff and driver mods.


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