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
