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GLIBC 2.16 Brings X32 Support, ISO C11 Compliance, Better Performance

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 30, 2012 @10:24PM from the new-and-shiny dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The GNU C Library version 2.16 was released with many new features over the weekend. The announcement cites support for the Linux x32 ABI, ISO C11 compliance, performance improvements for math functions and some architectures, and more than 230 bug fixes."

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Re:X32 by sapphire+wyvern · 2012-06-30 23:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

Good question. I looked at the linked article and it took me a while to figure out.
x64 CPUs aren't just x86 CPUs with larger memory addresses. They also have more registers, and are guaranteed to support certain additional instructions that aren't necessarily available in an x86 CPU (e.g. SSE). "x32" mode exploits the additional registers & instructions, without actually using 64-bit memory addressing. I think the idea is that it's supposed to allow for most of the benefits of the x64 instruction set without incurring the caching penalties of larger pointers. Honestly I'm not sure how useful that really is.