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Porting to 64-bit Linux
An anonymous reader writes "As 64-bit architectures continue to gain popularity it is becoming more and more important to make sure that your software is ready for the shift. IBMDeveloperworks takes a look at a few of the most common pitfalls when making sure your applications are 64-bit ready. From the article: 'Major hardware vendors have recently expanded their 64-bit offerings because of the performance, value, and scalability that 64-bit platforms can provide. The constraints of 32-bit systems, particularly the 4GB virtual memory ceiling, have spurred companies to consider migrating to 64-bit platforms. Knowing how to port applications to comply with a 64-bit architecture can help you write portable and efficient code.'"
The answer is no, RTFA. This the exact perception that it lays to waste.
Generally architecture changes, compiler version changes, break code on large projects. Over a million lines of code, any tiny little difference in the platform that the original developers didn't think to account for will come up *somewhere*. A good example of this is if you are dumping data structures to disk or network and write a size_t variable. Suddenly, you can no longer communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit versions of your software.
As a general rule, "just a recompile" *never happens* for any architecture and compiler change on a project above a certain size. Compiler writers break compatibility with some little ol' thing they don't think anyone is using, but which everyone is actually using in *every* version, fail to implement uncommon or difficult language features, add non standard features that other compilers don't support. Then application developers do things like not swapping to network byte order and using architecture dependent data types (size_t as in the example). Between different unices, header file contents will change.
The fixes are often not that hard (usually trivial) to do between say versions of the same compiler, or endian switches... but they are still there and annoy the hell out off people trying to compile old open source software on a new platform, like say macosx was a few years ago and x86 64 is now. There's always growing pains.
That really depends on the code. x64 changes the size of a stardard pointer, but didn't change the size of a word. In the real world (assuming we're talking about an app which was always 32bit only), once you get something to build against x64, you're about 90% done (because coders are human, and people do stupid shit sometimes).
... bleh. That intermittently breaks in wonderfully interesting ways.
In my experience, most of the problems will center around using non-pointer types with pointer-types. Mostly around bounds checking, offsets into arrays, pointer arithmatic, etc. I've seen some really aweful code which actually stores pointer values in non pointer types
Provided your code isn't written in assembly, do you really _have_ to do anything else than to recompile it?
Do you realise how difficult it is to find a healthy goat and sacraficial knife these days?
May the Maths Be with you!
Ignoring 64Bit helps a lot to write portable code. For 99.999% of all Apps out there 64Bit is irrelevant, anyways.
I suspect what you're saying is that there is no particular need for 64-bit in most apps, which I agree with. But the point here is that the program should work correctly, which means code that makes assumptions like pointers and ints being the same size needs to be fixed. The point is that amd64 is making 64-bit platforms relevant to more users, not that everyone thinks most apps will be gee-whiz faster as a result.
As a side note, some programs may realise minor performance gains on amd64 from having more general purpose registers available. This is, of course, technically nothing to do with it being 64-bit but does mean that there is a potential benefit even if you never need more than 4GB of addressable memory.
First of all, this dumbass incompetent nutjob didn't write this code in the first place. It's a real world example of code I happen to have fixed because it turned out not to work on 64-bit.
However, while it is indeed a hack, I would like to challenge you to suggest a better version that:
a) is as portable (so no assembly for checking overflow flags that for instance Alpha doesn't have)
b) uses only 1 multiplication and a comparison in case of overflow, and 2 multiplications otherwise.
The point is, from a pragmatic point of view, this is a very valid solution that has always worked and produced 100% correct results until 64-bit CPUs came about.
Even well written code can have problems.
Specifically, say I have a 64 bit platform capable of running both LP64 code and ILP32 (legacy) code.
I use a shared memory segment to communicate between my legacy 32 bit applications, and it has internal use of pointers to perform self-reference on data.
[Rather than complicating things, let's just assume that the pointers are internally based off the base address of the shared memory segment, rather than being based off of 0, so there is no requirement of mapping the memory into the same location in each process]
I'm now adding a 64 bit computation engine (perhaps my application is a rendering system that uses plug-ins, and being able to work on large data sets with the large address space afforded to 64 bit processes is critical, but when it comes to displaying the results, I can live easily in a 32 bit address space, so I'm not trying to port my whole tool over to 64 bits).
So now I have to deal with the internal pointers in the shared memory segment. I can do one of several things:
(1) I can use structure coercion to treat the pointers as if they were integer offsets instead, and coerce them into pointers internally in the 64 bit code (on LP64, pointers are 64 bit).
(2) I can intenrally store 64 bit pointers, rather than 32 bit pointers. This means I need the same round-tripping, but it can take place in the 32 bit applications, rather than the 64 bit applications, and the Integer representation is as "long long" as far as its concerned.
(3) I can support either a "short void *" in 64 bit applications, or a "long void *" in 32 bit applciations.
If I go with approach #3, I get to keep my type checking. With the other two approaches, I have explicit coercion, and I lose my type checking and boundary/range checking: the explicit casts quiet the warnings, even when they are used incorrectly.
If I go further, and allow the segment to be mapped anywhere in memory, it may be mapped over 4G. I might also have relative base addressing (e.g. listerner converts), where I store the internal base address in the provider as part of the data being provided). This may sound like a strange scenario (e.g. it's like DCE RPC, in that it becomes the receiver's responsibility to convert, if a conversion is needed), but it's very useful. It has the following attributes:
(a) If I use homogeneous consumer/providers, no conversion is necessary
(b) My "work horse" application can do their work, and it's up to my "viewer" applciation to do the conversion; presumably, it's not doing much other than interacting with a slow human, so this ends up being the best division of labor
(c) As time goes forward, the rest of my application is likely to migrate to 64 bit as well, so I get performance improvements over time, as the coversion requirements drop out.
You could argue that because the program was not 64 bit clean, it's not "well written". You could also argue that losing the compiler warning checking is "OK, because it's your own fault for not porting everything" (if you didn't believe in closed source third party plugins over which you had no control).
I would argue that you can expect someone to accurately predict future users of their software, and there's only so much work you can do to make sure that things don't break horribly at some arbitrary point in some arbitrary compilation environment.
For the most part, we have to rely on our tools.
And our tools do not tell us when this type of problem happens, because this type of problem is relatively new.
-- Terry