On Sat, 2010-02-27 at 18:05 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Saturday 27 February 2010 05:24:32 pm bruce wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 8:31 AM, William Case <billlinux(a)rogers.com> wrote:
> > I am using a *fc12.x86_64 machine. I just now upgraded several packages
> > with yum (yumex) and noticed several i686 packages being upgraded as
> > well. Is this normal? Are some packages I have using i686 when I
> > should have only *.86_64 on my machine? Should I remove ALL i686
> > packages or just leave them alone? I am not overly concerned; just
> > wondering.
>
> as far as i know.. there is no true, only x64 OS from the redhat
> tree... although i think solaris has an actual tryu 64 bit OS...
>
> the 64 bit OS linux from redhat (fedora/centos/rhel/etc.. ) comes with
> a combination if i recall...
No, this is not true in general. The presence of i686 packages on a x86_64
system depends on what you have installed, and is not mandatory.
When F12 came out, I did a clean 64bit install, and had *zero* 32bit packages.
I only tainted this with 32bit dependencies for skype, since there is no 64bit
version of it (yet). Later on I tainted it again when installing dependencies
for Wolfram Mathematica package I use.
If there weren't for closed source software which depends on 32bit libraries,
I'd be having a clean 64bit-only system.
It used to be the case that x86_64 ("multilib") installations installed
many i386 libraries by default. More recent versions (since F10,
maybe?) only install i386 if needed by 32-bit executables.
A similar situation is probably for centos/rhel as well (although I am not
sure).
I think RHEL5 came out before this change in policy, so it shouldn't be
surprising to find i386 libs on RHEL/CentOS multilib installs. It
should be OK to remove them if they aren't needed to support particular
32-bit executables.
BTW, PPC64 installations *should* have 32-bit libs. On PPC64, you want
32-bit userland binaries whenever possible (i.e., if you don't need
64-bit ints or pointers), because on PPC there are no additional 64-bit
registers to offset the loss in performance due to 64-bit memory
transfers.
> leave them alone!!!
I agree. If you have 32bit packages on a (cleanly installed) 64bit system,
then they are there probably because something depends on them. Removing them
with yum might give you a hint what app needs them, and could break it if you
insist.
If you have upgraded to F12 from F11 or so, there might be stale 32bit
packages which are not needed anymore (like ndiswrapper, or was it
nspluginwrapper, or...?). In that case it is probably safe to remove them.
Yum is your friend. :-)
Best, :-)
Marko
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs