HEADSUP: 64 bit Cygwin is coming soon

[marco atzeri]

On 3/6/2013 5:32 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> 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.

ftp://cygwin.com/pub/cygwin/64bit/install/
                  ^^^
I assume

> 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
>