Thursday September 02, 2004
Thursday September 02, 2004
The wonderful world of AMD64
I already have the laptop capable of doing that (an Acer Ferrari 3200), so part of my work consists of getting the latest and greatest development bits onto it, and running. I get a tingle from executing isainfo -b, and get a result of 64.
Some people may think that this is lame (yes, Fintan, I mean you), but it means that I can test and verify all kinds of things in my time travelling into and out of the office by train. For example, this morning I verified that the read-only code for ext2 works just fine on 64bits. Mind you for fine read it works for a find /mntpt -type f -exec od {} \| head 2 \;, which for me is about as much testing as I can afford to spend on it. It needed a couple of compile flag changes, to support 64bit mode (-m64 | -xarch=amd64) but the code was just fine - a testament to the open source folks.
Another verification was a sound driver - I checked out the tools.de via82xx driver, which seemed to be the most appropriate one for the laptop, made some minor changes to the Makefiles (it didn't try to make 64bit drivers) and again I was treated with the witty remarks of Eddie Izzard; but this time it was running over a 64bit kernel.
Now if only my work was this easy :)
September 02, 2004 04:48 PM IST
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