64-bits

Today we announced the availability of the Adobe Flash Player browser plugin for x86_64 Linux distributions. It is a preview release which has known bugs but should be fit initial testing by the community.

With this release we are tackling one the most requested feature ever for the Linux version of the Flash Player, even before windowless mode support. My personal hope though is that the constant flood of complaints we get about this every day will finally come to an end.

I've shown the 64 bit version of the Linux version to the public a couple of months ago, at the Flashforward 2008 conference and I have spent time stabilizing it since then. Sadly we have received zero contributions to make the open source Tamarin VM work properly in 64-bit mode on Linux which would have possibly allowed us to get this done sooner. The good news for me personally is that I now have a thorough understanding of the different x86-64 calling conventions and the instruction set.

The areas which remain untested and non-functional are the following:

• Camera
• Microphone
• Fullscreen playback using OpenGL
• Various Flash Player 10 specific features

This initial version has no .rpm or .deb packages and is therefore intended for advanced users. We still have work to do to reduce the number of dependencies of the binary and handle situations where installing this plugin might conflict with packages like nspluginwrapper.

Talking about nspluginwrapper: I strongly suggest not to use it. I know that some distros are thinking of even wrapping 64-bit plugins including Ubuntu with the thought that it will improve security and stability of the browser. This is a very bad idea in the state nspluginwrapper is in today. We have done some internal testing and discovered that several features in the Flash Player are broken when the plugin is wrapped. More importantly performance and user experience is pretty bad when the plugin is wrapped. Why? Lots of data needs to be transfered through IPC channels. I hope that browser vendors will eventually come up with a better architecture to wrap plugins without sacrificing performance, stability and functionality.

Please do report bugs or other issues you find using the right channel. And that means our public bug database:

https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Comments on blogs, other web sites or 3rd party bug databases are not tracked by our quality assurance team. You are welcome to cross reference when you submit bugs though.

Now for some random items:

• All SIMD optimizations which where in the 32bit version have been ported. No exceptions.
• The 64-bit version is not faster than the 32-bit version as the 32-bit version was already well optimized. Scott Byer explained why some time ago: 64 bits...when?. You will see a big difference though when you get rid of nspluginwrapper.
• The first release of 64-bit Flash Player code was actually part of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 64-bit in form of an authplay.dll which is a plugin for applications. Second one was with Adobe Photoshop CS4 64-bit, also as an authplay.dll.
• The first 64-bit plugin for a browser we ship is this Linux version. Windows and Mac will come later.
• The 64-bit version of the plugin compiles and runs on FreeBSD 7.0 which I demoed at Flashforward 2008. There are no plans for release yet as it is still rather unstable and will require substantial work to get it ready for public consumption.
• A debugger version of the 64-bit version is not available yet. When we release it ActionScript 2 debugging will not work due the obsolete protocol which depends on 32bit pointers. ActionScript 3 debugging will be supported.