[CentOS] Is Biarch with 6.x now dead?

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Michael Lampe
<lampe at 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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com