x32 ABI is this a tool, how to use this?

Question

I am in requirement of increasing performance of my application which is on 32-bit so I thought to shift to 64-bit for increasing performance. But I came to know a bout x32abi

Below I have some links for information Just I want to know is this a tool or what it is

How to use it? I am confused with the links

• https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI
• http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2011/ocw/sessions/531

Answer 1

x32 is not a tool. It's an ABI, which is kind of an agreement between compilers, libraries and the OS. The idea is to be able to speed up some applications on x64 CPUs by using less space for pointers (smaller cache footprint, better locality for pointer-heavy data structures. And improved efficiency for atomic load/store/RMW of a pair of pointer-sized integers, since it's only 8 bytes total, not 16.)

There's a lot of cooperation required for this to happen. You need to build a special version of the Linux version and related tools to be able to compile and run programs with the x32 ABI.

See more details here:

• http://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/x32

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI