On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Michael Lampe lampe@gcsc.uni-frankfurt.de wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
Why not use a virtual machine for that and have a cleaner separation of the architectures?
Biarch runs natively and therfore faster, it can use hardware-accelerated OpenGL, it is easier to setup and use, and it is fully supported by TUV. To me the separation of arcitectures is clean enough and you simply switch from 64-bit-mode to 32-bit-mode by typing 'linux32'. How can it be better with a virtual machine?
Why does a compiler need OpenGL? And with separate machines (physical or virtual) you would just open windows on both at the same time.
Also consider for example a compute cluster. It will of course have the 64-bit version of CentOS installed, but some users may also want to run 32-Bit-Code on it (because it's faster in their case, because their code isn't 64-bit-clean yet, or because it's a 32-bit-only commercial code, whatever).
Having run-time libs for both isn't a problem. But if you want to test that something will run on a real 32 bit machine, a VM would be a more realistic test.