Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add 32bit emulation for wireless

From: "David S. Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 12:26:57 -0800

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 12:19:12 -0800
Jean Tourrilhes <[email-masked]> wrote:

> 	This analogy doesn't work. If your network is wireless, you
> won't connect to it with an Ethernet card (and vice versa). A fully 64
> bits userspace has only very minor downside, and most users won't see
> any difference. If we follow your line of thought, we should all be
> using a 16bit userspace on i386 (more compact, more compatible).

I think the situation is different.  On several 64-bit platforms we encourage
using 32-bit compilation and binaries by default because:

1) they're a lot faster than their 64-bit counterparts

2) they're a lot smaller than their 64-bit counterparts

3) 64-bits buys them absolutely nothing

Therefore the 32-bit compatability layer must be as fully supportive as humanly
possible.  Most 64-bit platforms still have %99 32-bit distributions.

This has been discussed to death a million times, please accept the situation and
work towards getting the 32-bit compat stuff working for these wireless ioctls.
We wouldn't be working on this if "just compile as 64-bit" we an acceptable solution
now would we :)