Mailing List Archive

On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 05:40:52PM -0500, Gene C. wrote:
> I am also getting a lot of warning messages saying that "cast of pointer to
> integer of different size" which leads me to believe that even if it dows
> compile, it may not work.

Not necessarily. I know that Nessus has worked on 64bits platforms in
the past. Most of the casts are actually int->ptr->int, so no
information is lost and it will probably work.


-- Renaud

"Gene C." <czarcing@cox.net> writes:

> Has anyone gotten nessus to work in 64 bit mode specifically on an AMD
> Athlon64 or Opteron (x86_64)?

AFAIK, if you don't need 64 bit mode, don't use it: executables are
bigger and thus slower.

> Right now I am getting a problem compiling
> nessus-libraries/libnessus/network.c where the gcc 3.3.2 compile
> hangs when run with -O2.

What do you mean by "hang"? If it is a GCC or Fedora problem, ask
another mailing list.

Just a personal opinion: Redhat 9 was a dreadfull OS for development
(I switched to Gentoo). If you really want to try a band new (and
possibly buggy) proc, you'd better use a distro that is more stable
than Fedora.

> I am also getting a lot of warning messages saying that "cast of pointer to
> integer of different size" which leads me to believe that even if it dows
> compile, it may not work.

Unless some GCC switch can implement short pointers or long integers.
Did anybody try to compile Nessus on other 64 bit machines? e.g. Alpha
or Sparc?

--
arboi@alussinan.org http://arboi.da.ru
FAQNOPI de fr.comp.securite http://faqnopi.da.ru/

On Sunday 28 December 2003 07:11, Renaud Deraison wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 05:40:52PM -0500, Gene C. wrote:
> > I am also getting a lot of warning messages saying that "cast of pointer
> > to integer of different size" which leads me to believe that even if it
> > dows compile, it may not work.
>
> Not necessarily. I know that Nessus has worked on 64bits platforms in
> the past. Most of the casts are actually int->ptr->int, so no
> information is lost and it will probably work.

So long as there are no int = ptr, then, yes, it should work.

I ran a quick check for the sizeof various variables and they are int=5,
double=8, and all ptr=8.
--
Gene

On Sunday 28 December 2003 09:23, Michel Arboi wrote:
> "Gene C." <czarcing@cox.net> writes:
> > Has anyone gotten nessus to work in 64 bit mode specifically on an AMD
> > Athlon64 or Opteron (x86_64)?
>
> AFAIK, if you don't need 64 bit mode, don't use it: executables are
> bigger and thus slower.

You are correct that this is the case on some systems (the Sun sparc64 has
been cited to me). However, in the case of the AMD64 (x86_64) architecture,
64 bit mode is actually quite a bit faster (has more registers available).

While you can run both 32 bit and 64 bit applications on the Fedora Core 1
x86_64 preview system I am using, most of the system (e.g., the kernel,
XFree86, gnome, kde) is 64 bit. It has only a few libraries (such as glibc)
which are both 32 bit and 64 bit. For example, libnasl needs both libcrypto
and libssl and these are only available in the 64 bit flavor.

>
> > Right now I am getting a problem compiling
> > nessus-libraries/libnessus/network.c where the gcc 3.3.2 compile
> > hangs when run with -O2.
>
> What do you mean by "hang"? If it is a GCC or Fedora problem, ask
> another mailing list.

It appears this is a gcc compiler problem. Fortunately I was able to gather
enough information and have reported it to the Red Hat compiler experts.

>
> Just a personal opinion: Redhat 9 was a dreadfull OS for development
> (I switched to Gentoo). If you really want to try a band new (and
> possibly buggy) proc, you'd better use a distro that is more stable
> than Fedora.

For the AMD64, there is mandrake and SUSE but I don't see much difference with
Fedora Core from my perspective.

>
> > I am also getting a lot of warning messages saying that "cast of pointer
> > to integer of different size" which leads me to believe that even if it
> > dows compile, it may not work.
>
> Unless some GCC switch can implement short pointers or long integers.
> Did anybody try to compile Nessus on other 64 bit machines? e.g. Alpha
> or Sparc?

All pointers are 8 bytes whereas int is 4 bytes (double is 8). There were a
lot of warnings and I did not check to see if any of them involved and "int =
ptr".
--
Gene