Re: Is the Latest Release of Cygwin supported on Windows Server 8/2012

[JonY <jon_y@users.sourceforge.net>]

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On 5/19/2012 09:15, Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> On 5/18/2012 4:37 PM, JonY wrote:
>>> OK, OK. Tack on "for most applications" to my statement (I thought it
>>> was assumed).
>> I believe the same was said when transitioning from 16bit to 32bit.
> If so then they were wrong.
>> Those are just pointers, instructions do not necessary double in size,
> I was under the impression that the instruction size matches the natural
> word size of the machine. Therefore they would be 64 bit instructions.

No, we are talking about x86, not MIPS/ARM type RISC.

>> we are talking about CISC CPUs after all, besides, nearly all
>> registers in 64bit long mode doubled in size, not to mention the
>> number of them increased, see AMD64 GPRs compared to x86 GPRs.
> I believe my AMD64 is considered a RISC computer. According to
> http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=788 "The K5 and K6 series are
> internally a highly parallel RISC processor using an x86 decoding
> front-end". And according to
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set: "In some architectures,
> notably most reduced instruction set computers (RISC), instructions are
> a fixed length, typically corresponding with that architecture's word
> size". Things might be different now. I really don't keep up with
> processors anymore.

Which do not apply to CISC CPUs, whatever implementation underneath is
tangent to the user code ISA, the opcodes did not double in size. Please
at least look at the x86 opcode, they are known to have variable lengths.

>>>> Besides, who cares that much about the image size these days?  We
>>>> don't, within reason.
>>> I, for one, do. These larger binary images need to fit in memory and
>>> reserve swap space and virtual memory. I see virtual memory foot prints
>>> in the hundreds of megs if not gigs. Chrome on my Ubuntu box regularly
>>> takes 1-2 gig of virtual memory and hundreds of megs of real memory. If
>>> you run many things like I do you quickly get to the point where your
>>> swapping and thrashing and waiting for the OS to manage many, many more
>>> fragments of memory. All my systems have 4 gig (XP at work, a couple of
>>> Ubuntu boxes at home) and they all come under memory pressure at times.
>>> Small is beautiful.
>> No modern OS actually loaded the entire executable into memory, not
>> since the MSDOS days, they are mapped, like pagefiles.
> So what.

Binary sizes do not correspond to memory usage, not anymore.

>>> All of this is irrelevant to the request to make say /bin/ls 64 bit.
>> And why not?
> And why not what? Your question doesn't make sense.
>> Even if the rest of the system has transitioned to 64bit?
> Even if the rest transitioned what? Your question doesn't make sense again.
>> If you didn't know, GCC does win64 applications fine. The hard part
>> for porting Cygwin to win64 is the LP64 vs LLP64 issue. The former is
>> used by newlib, it is not easy to transition to Win64 LLP64.
> I still don't understand what having a 64 bit version of ls or grep will
> do for ya...

Since 64-bit mode cannot be avoided, there is simply no reason to keep
legacy mode applications and all that baggage if you can easily rebuild
and move to 64-bit mode.

You don't keep 16-bit programs lying about when there are 32-bit
programs doing the same thing right?



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