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Re: 64 bit addressing

On Saturday, June 28, 2003, at 08:35 AM, Eric Shapiro wrote:

Now that the G5 has 64-bit addressing, how do you build your code to
use 64-bit pointers with GCC3.3 (so that 'struct foo * bar' is an 8
byte pointer)?

You should take a look at the white papers on Apple's website dealing
with the G5 processor and the PowerMac architecture. I think your
questions will be answered there.

Unless I missed something, the white papers don't answer that question.

One compiler option is listed to force "long long" G5 support, but no mention of enabling 64-bit pointers. Other questions:

What system APIs have changed?
Can I malloc a 5GB buffer?
Can I mmap a 9GB file or do I need to map smaller (< 32-bit) portions of it?
Can I build an application that runs in both 32 and 64-bit modes? Or should
we put 2 executables within our bundle instead?
Will Carbon & Cocoa APIs be updated with 64-bit pointer support? QuickTime? Quartz?

Panther won't be shipping for quite a while, though, so I suspect this sort of information will be forthcoming. It seems to me that the vast majority of apps should remain 32-bit unless there's a serious reason to move to 64.

What I currently gather, reading bits of information from Apple's website, is that Panthers kernel will be running in a 64 bit mode and obviously the VM system is updated to allow the use of pages from at least a 8 GB physical address range. It also knows how deal with the "down conversion" of address for use by PCI devices (PCI only supports 32 bit addresses).

Outside of that I believe the user mode libraries/frameworks will remain 32 bit and hence most processes/applications must remain 32 bit (if you are careful of what you use I see no reason you could not use 64 bit addressing in certain tasks). I have not seen anything yet that implies that new 64 bit addressing versions of the systems libraries and framework will be provided in Panther (I bet they will be recompiled to use 64 bit native math, etc. just not addressing).

I would like to know the low down as well, I guess it was a bad year to miss WWDC... (darn it)

-Shawn
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 >Re: 64 bit addressing (From: Eric Shapiro <email@hidden>)



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