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

[Jon M. Hanson]

On Nov 22, 2007, at 1:59 PM, Chris Gehlker wrote:

>
> 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.
>
>
>

A 32-bit processor can't run a 64-bit application. It has nothing to  
do with the kernel. The 64-bit processor has different registers in  
its assembly code and some different instructions.

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