Re: MEDIA: Sun's Opteron fleet finally goes on sale

From: Alan Coopersmith (alanc_at_alum.calberkeley.org)
Date: 07/27/04 

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 05:35:42 +0000 (UTC)

Chris Morgan <cm@mihalis.net> writes in comp.sys.sun.hardware:
|I don't think it's that simple. The programming model used for Solaris
|x86 has always been 32-bit and now they are just adjusting it for
|64-bit. I don't know how Sun handles the conditional compilations, but
|I can well imagine lots of ifdefs that check to see if it's sparc or
|intel and whether it's 32- or 64-bit. If anyone has made mistakes inD
|making their code "cross-platform" in this sense, those mistakes will
|only come out now - for example if someone used the fact of it simply
|being intel to choose 32-bit code.

Most of Solaris is a common source base, using the platform-independent
_LP64 #ifdef to check for 64-bit mode. Some code admittedly mistakenly
checked for _sparcv9 instead, but we've been working on cleaning that up
in the months we've had to prepare for this in the user-land software
while waiting for the kernel and compiler to be ready for us to build
our bits on top. 

-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Alan Coopersmith * alanc@alum.calberkeley.org * Alan.Coopersmith@Sun.COM
 http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~alanc/   *   http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/
  Working for, but definitely not speaking for, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Relevant Pages