HEADSUP: 64 bit Cygwin is coming soon

Corinna Vinschen corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com
Wed Mar 6 16:32:00 GMT 2013


Hi guys,

for those of you not reading the cygwin-developers list:

while we're not yet ready for public, 64 bit Cygwin running natively
on 64 bit Windows on AMD64 is near.

We already have a tiny test distro available on
ftp://cygwin.com/cygwin/64bit/install/, with packages you will have to
install by hand, for now.
First install the "base-cygwin-toolchain-install-first-$version.tar.xz"
package in some new directory (like C:\cygwin64).  Then unpack all other
tar archives you would like to try in that directory.  Just make sure
you're using the 'k' option to tar, for instance, from a 32 bit Cygwin
shell:

  $ pwd
  /cygdrive/c/cygwin64
  $ wget ftp://cygwin.com/cygwin/64bit/install/dash-0.5.7-2.x86_64.tar.xz
  [...]
  $ tar xJkf dash-0.5.7-2.x86_64.tar.xz

That's where we are, and as far as anybody can say right now, there
will *probably* be no more backward incompatible changes which require
to build everything from scratch.

The 64 bit distro will be entirely distinct from the 32 bit distro.  It
turned out that the interaction between 64 and 32 bit Cygwin processes
required to get everything working smoothly (tty handling, exexcve,
/proc, etc) would be so much work that it would took another couple of
months to get it working correctly.  So what we're now striving for is
to get the 64 bit distro up to speed in a relatively short time, so at
least the most important packages will exist in a 64 bit version.  If
you have 32 bit application which you can't recompile for some reason or
another, there will be no problem to run the 32 and the 64 bit distro in
parallel on the sam machine... provided it's a 64 bit AMD64 machine ;)

So, what does that mean for you maintainers?

Of course we would be glad if everybody of you would help creating all
packages for 32 and 64 bit.  Cygport will be a good help here since the
inofficial version from git already supports building 32 and 64 bit
packages.  Also, we're planning to create an x86_64-pc-cygwin cross
compiler for the 32 bit Cygwin environment, so even those only running a
32 bit version of Windows and no access to a 64 bit Windows can build 64
bit packages.

There's also the chance to run 64 bit Windows in VMs under 64 bit Linux,
if you have access to such a machine.  Microsoft provides ISOs of, for
instance, Windows 2012 R2 with a 180 days license, which are a pretty
good testbed for testing 64 bit versions of your packages.

Right now, this is only informational.  I'd be glad if you're as happy
as I am that 64 bit Cygwin is already working and hope you're willing to
support this distro.


Thanks,
Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat



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