****What's up with 64 bit Linux

[Chris Gehlker]

On Nov 22, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Craig White wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 11:19 -0700, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>>

[snip]

>> So out of curiosity I went to the web to find out a little about  64-
>> bit OSes and this seems to be the conventional wisdom:
>>
>> There are no advantages to 64-bit OSes that offset the losses from
>> bigger code due to bigger pointers and integers
>> There are classes of  applications that can really benefit from 64-
>> bithood, especially those that memory map big files.
>> 32-bit OSes can be written to support 64-bit applications at least on
>> Intel and PowerPC.
>>
>> So why is Linux moving in the direction of separate 32-bit and 64-bit
>> builds? Is it  just to remain portable on less popular hardware?
> ----
> I've been using Fedora 7 86_64 at work on a fair amount of desktops  
> and
> it works well, including Firefox, including nspluginwrapper for 32 bit
> Flash and Acrobat plugins and people are happy.

I'm curious. Why did you decide to go with a 64-bit version of Fedora?  
Do you have applications that work better or are only  available in 64- 
bit versions?
>
>
> There must be something wrong in your setup or hardware because it
> should work well...including launch times.

I strongly suspected that. I'm surprised though because I didn't have  
to do any tweaking to get the 32-bit version to work well. I'm still  
curious as to why the developers didn't go in the direction of just  
supporting 64-bit apps on a 32-bit kernel.


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In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.
-Adlai Stevenson, statesman (1900-1965)