re: mips64eb seems to be mostly 32-bit

[matthew green <mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost>]

> The odd thing is, whilst the kernel is aware that the CPU is 64-bit,
> the userspace binaries from the install sets are 32-bit. The same
> stands for the binaries that come from pkgsrc and for the binaries
> compiled from C code natively on the system. Is there a fundamental
> reason for this, or is this a build system issue?

this is normal.

the binaries are 32-bit but require a 64-bit CPU, as they rely
upon 64 bit registers existing, but run in a 32-bit address
space, which generally reduces the memory requirements for the
same task, and often the performance is the same (since the
native 64-bit maths operations are available) or even better,
and sometimes worse.

we are starting to prepare a pure-64 bit mips system, but it
is still not quite ready for general usage (if you notice that
-current/HEAD builds now include "mipsn64*" builds.  note the
'n' in the middle.  but these aren't for netbsd 9.x releases,
and will hopefully be properly working for netbsd 10.x.)


.mrg.