Multi-arch

I am following up on the questions raised here about running both
32-bit and 64-bit binary code on the same machine. This is called
biarch. Currently, the gcc-4.1 source package in Debian supports biarch
for a few languages, but this support is maintenance-intensive and
partial. Most notably, Ada does not currently support biarch (and
neither does AdaCore). Furthermore, administration of a biarch system
is more complex than that of a single-arch system, as not all binary
packages support biarch, and some support packages are required, e.g.
ia32-libs.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu (a derivative of Debian), has
written two very interesting papers about multi-arch, including an
introduction, problems, and a proposed solution. Multi-arch is a
generalisation of biarch, and allows mixing packages for several
architectures that are compatible with a processor. For example, an
Athlon or Opteron system can run binaries for all of amd64, i386, i486,
i586 and i686. The proposed design would solve the current problems
with biarch, at the expense of rewriting dpkg almost from scratch.

http://multiarch.alioth.debian.org/

Thoughts?

--
Ludovic Brenta.

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