[wpkg-users] Extend 64-bit support for IA64

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Stefan,

On 10.07.2011 13:46, Stefan Pendl wrote:
> Those pesky typos, had my fingers crossed while hammering at the keyboard, it seems.
>
> I do not have a testing system either, but I once got in contact with one of the first Itanium workstations an HP Itanium 1.
> In general the only difference between IA64 and AMD64 is the name, those things checked by WPKG are identical.

No, they are NOT identical. See below.

> I would change the variable x64 into the general one 64bit, since it will flag any of the two 64-bit architectures.
> There is no difference in handling the registry in this respect.

No, here I do not agree. As a package deployer you definitely need to know 
whether the system is IA64 or AMD64/x64/x86_64 (only the later group refers to 
the same thing).

See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA64>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86>

Basically IA64 refers to a new Intel 64-bit architecture. It is not compatible 
with classic x86 architecture and requires software to be specifically compiled 
for IA64. In fact only the Intel Itanium CPU (which is dead anyway, btw) 
supports this instruction set. On these CPUs all 32-bit applications are 
"emulated" and generally run pretty slow.

x86-64 instead is a technology built on classical x86 instruction set. In fact 
x86-64 CPUs are more "extended 32-bit CPUs with 64-bit registers". So usually 
such x86-64 CPUs run 32-bit applications without any performance hit.

x86-64 and IA64 are NOT compatible and therefore it's required to detect both.

Currently WPKG detects the architecture by the system environment-variable 
PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE. It states "AMD64" on x86-64 systems and "x86" on 32-bit 
Windows installations. Likely it reads "IA64" on Itanium systems.

As it is part of the extended host match you would have to define "^(x64|ia64)$" 
to match both - but it would still be possible. But I insist that WPKG would not 
just identify both architectures as being x64 as this is not true.

Does anybody operate an IA64 system who can tell us what value the 
PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE environment variable has on such a system?

I also do not regard this as being as being very high priority as close to 
nobody really dares to operate such a dead system (except HP-affiliates). It 
might rather become more useful to detect ARM systems starting from Windows 8 :-).
Of course given the fact that WSH is still supported in Windows 8.

br,
Rainer