On 2014-07-08, at 10:19, Jim McCarthy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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 ?

The toolchain builds ia32 executables (gcc -m32 , ld -m elf_i386).
And unlike ia64, x86_64 runs them without performance penalty.

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY - DV -
Platanenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany