INTERVIEW: SuSE's Schläger tells the 64bit Linux story

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 2 Oct 2003 at 12:56

With SuSE's 64bit Linux OS out the door sharply on the heels of AMD's Athlon 64, Chris Schläger, Director of Distribution Development, gives us the low-down on why the 64bit SuSE Linux 9.0 Desktop operating system is the only choice for making the 64bit leap.

Also on hand to offer their wisdom were Malcolm Yates, SuSE's Strategic Alliance man, and Marketing Director Jasmin Ul-Haque.

Exactly who is the 64bit version of SuSE Linux Desktop 9.0 aimed at?

CS
There's only the Professional 64bit version available as the type of hardware you can buy right now is pretty high end PCs, and I don't think the Personal Edition really needs it.

JU
We see it really for system integrators who have the demand for this type of product.

Is the software suite sitting of top the 64bit operating system also built in 64bit?

CS
Yes, mostly, but there are a few exceptions because, for example, we don't have the source code, so we can't recompile them in 64bit. Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, RealPlayer - they'll run in 32bit mode, so the user doesn't really notice.

And there's OpenOffice, for example, which still has some problems with the code. That's a 32bit implementation. But we are working on making that 64bit and in the next version that should be 64bit as well.

But the multimedia applications, such as the GIMP image editor?

CS
All those are 64bit, yes.

So you're stealing quite a march on the competition - it's not just the operating system that's 64bit, but the applications on top?

CS
Yes, but then Linux, with the Alpha DEC machines, was the first 64bit operating system available to the masses - well, I say masses... there were people who had the chance to get one of those.

MY
Yes, you could have bought an Alpha machine for a reasonable price.

CS
We're especially lucky that in the Linux community enough people did that, and from that point on people designed their software with 64bit in mind, so Linux has never really had a 64bit problem.

Given that we have 3,000 software packages that we care for, and we compile them on every platform that we have, this gives you the idea that there is a lot of software that is already 64bit clean.

So the Athlon 64 is not the first 64bit operating system that we have. We've had the Alpha for more than three - almost four - years now. That means there was this four year period where people could pool and fix their software, and now we have products like the z-Series 64bit - although the z-Series is not for multimedia software. And there is PowerPC, which is also 64bit, at least in one flavour. So, it's there, because Linux was actually ported four or five years ago to 64bit.

That is the reason why for AMD, we just needed to do the port of the operating system.

The low level parts, like the glibc, the compiler and the kernel, they had to be adapted to the new instruction set - there was no way round that, so there was some work involved. But fortunately, once this was done and you had the base, the rest came just automatically.

We have this automatic filter system that reads both packages on any platform. And we were amazed at how quickly that compiled them: the complete suite of 3,000 packages.

We were so fast doing that we did the port together with AMD, when the chip was only in the design phase.

So, when they had hardware, the first silicon, it took them two days to boot a Linux OS, and that OS was SuSE Linux - that was the first 64bit operating system that ran on the Athlon 64. Prior to that we were working with simulators back then to develop our software.