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Adobe Flex: Article

Where is 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player?

Flash Player uses the open source Mozilla Tamarin VM
By James Ward
Article Rating:
May 27, 2008 02:00 PM EDT
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 7,111
James Ward's Blog

I run 32-bit Linux but there is a very vocal group of people who really want 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player. Today there is a decent workaround for running the 32-bit Flash Player on a 64-bit Linux system using the nspluginwrapper.

From what I’ve heard it works fairly well on most distros but I haven’t heard yet how well it works with the new Flash Player 10 beta. Despite this potential workaround eventually Adobe does need to natively support 64-bit Linux - and they will.

This is not as simple as a recompile - otherwise there would be 64-bit support today. There is a bug already filed in the public Flash Player bug database for 64-bit support.

I’d encourage you to not just go vote for that bug but also to get involved. As Tinic Uro points out in the bug comments, the missing piece for 64-bit support is open source - so you can help! Flash Player uses the open source Mozilla Tamarin VM. This VM does not yet support 64-bit Linux because all that machine code generation in the JIT compiler needs to be ported from 32-bit to 64-bit. The code is in Mozilla’s Tamarin Central Mercurial repo.

This IS open source! You can help get 64-bit Linux support for Flash Player!

Published May 27, 2008 – Reads 7,111
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe’s JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains, he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90s; then Java and many of its frameworks beginning in the late 90s. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

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