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

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 13:59 -0700, 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?
----
easy answer...Dell Optiplex 320

i386 (32 bit) had multiple issues on this hardware including but most
especially the inability to work properly with the drive controller (SB
600) and a heavy hammer of requiring kernel parameter of acpi=off. 86_64
didn't have those issues which made the choice of installing 64 bit
rather easy. There has been some regression on Fedora 8 (2.6.23 kernel)
and I've heavily reported in Fedora bugzilla including to kernel-maint
people on this...I am a bit disconcerted here.
----
> > 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 can't help you there - your probably need to check in with Ubuntu
folks
----
>  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.
----
Way out of my league here.

Craig