[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to tell for sure what bit your OS is?

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 05/31/17 09:19 AM, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
> Aside from executables that reference timestamps (given that a signed twos-complement will overflow after Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 GMT), and for programs that will never need to manipulate files larger than 2GiB-1 (unless  they use large file support), is it necessarily desirable to upgrade user-space binaries at all?  On x86, ok you get more registers and such; but on SPARC, I've heard you may be better off with V8 (or V8+), given smaller binaries, better use of cache, etc.

Remember that any program that calls stat() on a file references timestamps
and can get stat() failures with an out-of range timestamp.

Also as noted in the blogs various newer features either work better with 64-bit
pointers (like ASLR) or can only work with 64-bit pointers (like ADI on SPARC).

> Ok, thinking about it, now that static libc is gone, with the time issues, a 32-bit libc would be an invitation to forget that it wouldn't work with something that used timestamps, not to mention whatever complications follow from maintaining support for 32-bit executables.

All very true too - at some point there's going to be little benefit in
maintaining a second copy of every single shared library for all those
32-bit programs, plus all the translation layers in the kernel for 32-bit
syscalls.   That point is probably years in the future, but certainly
less than 20 years from now.

	-alan-