Martin Husemann said;
Both sparc64 and amd64 default to 64bit userland but provide -m32 supportto create 32bit binaries. ...Of course this does not mean that ppc64 or mips64 would have to choose the same default.
As a pipe dreaming, I'm inclined to 32bit userlands with 64bit kernel for them since Linux/ppc64 and IRIX6 did so, however, some naive free software get confused by uname -a result to determine which userland API to go. I've openSUSE11 for dualcore PPC970 PCIe PowerMac G5 at hard, and occationally get tangled by poor configure script to choose 64/32bit env. Toru Nishimura / ALKYL Technology