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

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> On May 31, 2017, at 12:32, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

The alternative would be a large times analog of large file support; why that wasn't done when 64-bit began, I don't understand. :-)


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