32Bit Emulation on 64Bit procs
when the processor runs in 32Bit Mode and the 64bit registers are emulating 32Bit and the 32bit registers are emulating 8 bit
is it bossible to set up the processor so that all the processes are only 32 bit as that would mean twice the number of registers for 32Bit and a lot more performance lol
and is it possible to boot in a mode where most processes root in the 32bit process and the funky stuff like sound positioning are rendered in 64 bit ?
aka to have 64 bit drivers and a 32 bit os so as to use all the function to the fullest
First of all your terminology is wrong. A x86_64 isn’t emulating i386. i386 is a 32-bit mode of the x86_64 processor. You can’t use “extra registers” in 32-bit mode. Standard 32-bit code doesn’t know about any “extra registers”. It wouldn’t be a standard i386 architecture if it had “extra registers”.
When you install 64-bit Linux there is no problem running 32-bit applications as long as the 32-bit libraries are available. Not the converse though. OpenSUSE makes this quite easy. However the OS can only be one width, you can’t mix a kernel and drivers of different widths.* That’s the way it is. You need to read up on how the kernel interacts with the hardware to understand why.
Unless you do some funky things with driver wrappers, which are always a bit fragile.
Isn’t that what I just said, that 32-bit instructions are not emulated on x86_64? Or do you not understand the word isn’t.
If you want emulation, there are emulators like that which can run 32-bit OSes on a 64-bit hardware just fine. The inconvenience comes when you want to connect up the native system and the emulated system, as people find when they want use devices and files in both systems. Though I have to admire VMWare’s efforts to make it transparent; I dragged a file from the emulated Windows to the native Mac window and it obligingly did a copy.
