This is an old article describing how to enable gcc multilib support in Freebsd… Is something like that feasible in Haiku too?
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For what do you want to use this? Compiling 32bit code is possible, the buildtools use this.
We have no 32bit userland on 64bit whatsoever, and currently no plans to add one.
(If you are thinking about wine, nowadays it does not require a 32bit userland)
Wine it is… You got it right
Wine version 10 should be useable for 32bit applications without a 32bit userland. We will have to see if we need to change anything in Haiku for that to work, but if we do have to we will probably just do that. : )
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There is an old unfinished patch for the kernel part of this in Gerrit: https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/2874
I am aware, but this is intended mainly for the case of BeOS compat, and the the question is still if we want or need that for 64bit.
So far there has not been any real interest.
There was enough interest by Korli to write and test the patch, to the point that it got various BeOS apps and even Haiku apps such as LibreOffice running.
Unfortunately other developers decided that it shall bitrot forever on Gerrit instead of being merged, because there are some possible improvements or different ways to handle such things.
This is a sure way of killing any interest from the involved developers.
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How do you figure that? there are no -2 on that change. Nobody said it has to bitrot. From a plain backwards compat standpoint supporting 32bit applications on 64bit haiku is neat.
If you think this is good enough, and shall be improved later, give a +2 and we can merge this. For me this is a bit over my head to judge the technical aspects of it…
That patch linked above has a link to an earlier version https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/427 that was abandoned after korli gave up on it after too many changes were requested. That one was working already in 2018. We could have that problem done and solved for 7 years. But no, instead there was a mailing list thread, the change was abandoned by the original author, re-submitted a second time, and abandoned again because some people think things should be done in a different way (but have no interest in doing it themselves).
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Too bad that similar seems to happen often. Letting a (distant) perfect be the enemy of good enough (that we could have in the meantime).
Being able to test 32 bits apps (for haikuports work for example), without having to maintain [*] a 32 bits install, that I have zero interest on otherwise, would be nice.
[*] or at least not reboot in to it so often.
That’s a shame. On the other hand, buggy patches that break many parts of the OS get merged without much scrutiny…
I too very much would like to be able to run 32-bit BeOS applications on a 64-bit system. Beyond that, there is no need for 32-bit support.
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I think it can be very useful when building heavy projects for 32bit with 64bit compilers. It is easier than cross-compilation because it does not require creating an environment for it.
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