Ok, so we've gotten a good start on multilib in portage over the past few months. amd64's 2005.0 has been great in some areas and terribly lacking in other areas. We've started seeing more design flaws, and I'm thinking of doing some revisions to the toolchain/profile logic which will allow for much better crossdev toolchain integration as well as phasing out the ABI variable.

ABI was introduced because CHOST was insufficient to ALWAYS determine the ABI being used... The main example for this is mips64-u-l-g. We have no way to distinguish between n32 or n64 with this ABI. Most other examples are a bit more obscure. For instance, we MAY want to make a.out binaries for i386-*.

Well, yesterday I spent some time debugging sound on my Ultra10. I threw in an old pci sound card I had lying around (ens1371 based), and all the remaining alsa issues I've been having seem to be cleared up.

The ioctl32 bugs were cleared out in alsa-driver-1.0.8, but <alsa-lib-1.0.8 still had some ioctl problems. With alsa-{lib,driver}-1.0.8 and my PCI sound card, all native ALSA apps are functioning properly. I'm no longer getting messages about bad ioctl calls with 32bit apps or 64bit apps.

Additionally, with the sbus cs4231, all issues present in 32bit applications are present in their 64bit counterparts, so it seems the ioctl32 code has been cleaned out well enough to work on machines other than amd64.