On Apr 27, 2010, at 11:36 AM, Jeff Morriss wrote:
> Given that the MacOS buildbot (at least the Intel one) is so fast, would
> it make sense to also build a 64-bit version of Wireshark?
As long as we make sure it works on Leopard before we offer it to Leopard users. The BPF in Leopard, as I remember, had bugs in 64-bit mode and, as
1) Leopard's compiler built 32-bit by default
and
2) Leopard didn't ship with 32-bit executables in most cases - most significantly, for tcpdump
and
3) 99 44/100% of Mac OS X applications don't capture network traffic
most of the bugs weren't found until Snow Leopard shipped a 32-bit/64-bit kernel and 32-bit/64-bit tcpdump (and, as tcpdump, unlike Wireshark, doesn't use a sub-second timeout when capturing, one of them wasn't even found then - it showed up with Wireshark when built on Snow Leopard, and was fixed in 10.6.2 with a libpcap workaround, and un-fixed in 10.6.3 when the workaround was no longer being applied due to a change in the way libpcap was built).
We could, I guess, build dumpcap 32-bit only, and just build Wireshark and TShark 64-bit.
Also, that would require arranging, somehow, to have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of GLib installed, with the different versions of Wireshark built against the different versions. You could make the *libraries* 2-way fat, but making the *header files* work both in 32-bit and 64-bit mode might take a little more work. (Or have separate buildbots.) For the OS versions on which we can make both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions work, we'd probably want to lipo them together - along with the supporting libraries - so that there's one version that would work on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors.
