Multiarch Architecture Specifiers (Tuples)

This document describes the new schema for representing architecture ABIs as directory names, using normalized GNU triplets.

The abandoned proposal can be found at Multiarch/TuplesAbandoned.

This page is part of the larger effort to implement Multiarch library handling on Linux. For more information about Multiarch, see Multiarch, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec.

The problem

Multiarch specifies a method of making libraries for multiple, mutually-incompatible architectures installable on a single filesystem in a manner that ensures the same binaries can be used without modification on any system. To accomplish this, we require unique identifiers for each architecture that identifies an incompatible set of libraries that we want to be co-installed. We want these identifiers to be specified in as vendor-neutral a manner as possible, to ensure we retain maximal binary compatibility across Linux distributions.

Why not use GNU triplets?

Earlier proposals for multiarch did use GNU triplets as the components of the library path. Proof-of-concept implementations ran into two distinct cases where GNU triplets could not be used effectively in a cross-distribution manner:

Used solution

Use normalized GNU triplets for most tuples, and extend the GNU triplet when it is ambiguous.

The status describes if the name is used in a (to be) released version of Debian and/or Ubuntu (release), if it is a new or abandoned port on Debian Ports (port), or if it's used as a name for a Debian gcc multilib configuration (biarch).

Supporting interfaces