On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org> wrote:

Am 01.07.2011 06:48, schrieb Allan McRae:

...

Hi all,

I was looking at the /lib64 folder and wondering what it is really needed for...  It just seems clutter to me on a pure x86_64 system (or even with a multilib in lib32 folders like we have). As far as I can tell, most things are perfectly fine without that folder and its two symlinks.

I would like some help testing removing this so I can get an idea of what issues people run into.  There is bound to be some software that makes assumptions about /lib64 in its installation and I would like to know (a) how widespread that issue is and (b) how hard it is to work around.

If you want to try it out, just remove the /lib64 folder (after making sure it only has symlinks to ld-2.13.so and ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 in it. Run your system as usual for a while and report any issues you come across.

First of all, /lib64/ld-2.14.so is unnecessary, only /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so must exist.

The problem is quite simple: The ELF binary hardcodes the path to the interpreter (which is the linker). Binaries that were compiled for other distributions or generic binaries distributed by third parties will have the path "/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2" hardcoded as their interpreter - I don't know where this convention comes from and why they didn't choose /lib (choosing /lib would be no problem, as the file names for the 32 and 64 bit linkers differ, the former is ld-linux.so.2).

Just FTR, it most likely comes from http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#LIB64