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Future Platform Support

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According to the webpage, DIRSIG4 is currently only supporting Solaris/SPARC 2.9+ and Linux/x86 2.4 kernels.

The next set of releases (dirsig-3.6.5 and dirsig-4.0.7) will come with experimental support for the x86-64 platform. Internally, we have a cluster of Athlon64 machines running Fedora Core 5. The added registers on the 64-bit x86 architecture give a significant speed boost over the 32-bit counterpart.

The biggest issue with supporting new platforms is packaging the end product. Solaris is a particular pain because users are poor at keeping their installations up to date. There are still people out there using Solaris 8 when the current OS version is Solaris 10.

Another issue is which version of LAM MPI to use for the Linux builds. The key contenders are 7.0.6 and 7.1.2. Most of our userbase tend to have older OS setups, so we will probably use the former.

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