Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.
Launchpad entry: https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/sparc64-64bit-apps
Packages affected: unknown in general. (Cluster suites will definitely benefit from this transition)
Rationale/Summary
Recently we noticed an increase in the number of users building their own 64bit applications on sparc. At the moment our 64 bit userland support is suboptimal. We do provide only a bare minimum set of libraries and we should re-evaluate the possibility to have a better 64bit userland support despite the fact that it is slower than 32bit userland.
Use cases
- Company XX wants to deploy a set of 64bit applications for their linux sparc based computation cluster and they want to make sure that the distribution they will use, will provide a proper 64bit set of libraries/apps.
Design
- evaluate what set of libraries and apps should be shipped in 64bit.
Implementation
- Modify packages to build both 32 and 64 bit and ship 64bit bits in proper places (like /lib64).
Unresolved issues
- 64 bit applications are barely tested at the moment on sparc. Should we ship them in an alternative PATH or should we just change them?