On Mon, 7 Jul 2014, Connie Sieh wrote:
>>
>> I note that only X86-64 is available; have I missed something about 
>> supported ISAs, or will there also be an IA-32 port/distribution as 
>> well?
>>
>> Yasha Karant
>
> TUV is only releasing X86-64 .
> 
> -Connie Sieh

Is this for TUV "v7 ALPHA", or is this to become 'the new normal' going
forward ?

If no more IA-32 support, what would it take to convince the binutils (?)
development powers-that-be to make available for X86-64 the ld linker option
"-taso" (truncated address space option).  Back in the day [1], this option
existed on Red Hat Linux for DEC Alpha, and the net effect on that 64-bit
machine was to create an executable in which memory addresses were
restricted to the lower 32-bits of address space.  Legacy source code that
used 32-bit (4-byte) integers as pointers to memory addresses could
therefore be compiled (in gcc, the "-Wl,-taso" option would pass "-taso"
along to the linker), built, and run on the 64-bit machine, albeit without
taking advantage of the additional memory address space available on the
64-bit machine (e.g., the DEC Alpha processor family).

Most unfortunately, the ia64 (Itanium) binutils ld linker never had this
feature that appears to have withered away with Linux for DEC Alpha, nor has
the X86-64 binutils ld linker had this feature either.  So in my case I've
been hanging onto IA-32 as my SL platform-of-choice.   But if IA-32 is no
longer going to be offered, might there be value in resuscitating the
"-taso" option for the linker in X86-64 ?  From my perspective this only has
an upside, for those that want/need it ... is there a hidden downside I
don't see ?

Thanks,

    -- Jim McCarthy

[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/axp-list/2005-January/msg00015.html