On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 06:58:15PM +0100, Jonas Meurer wrote: > Do you have any reasons for that suggestion? Which disadvantages does > the amd64 port have on system with up to 2GB of RAM?
A few programs still don't compile or work on 64bit systems (not amd64 specific, just 64bit system specific), but other than that generally no disadvantages. I guess you could say that the fact the programs are slightly bigger (since all pointers become 8 bytes rather than 4) is a disadvantage, but on the other hand a lot of code runs slightly faster with 64bit, with a few types of programs running much faster. A few very very pointer heavy programs might run slightly slower, although I don't know of any where this is the case. With 64bit you can memory map much bigger files than with 32bit which can make implementing some programs much simpler and probably more efficient too, so there seems to be many good reasons to move to 64bit. The main missing programs seem to be things which are closed source, so adobe flash, acrobat reader, etc. Some of these do have more or less functional open source replacements. Video codecs can also be a problems since many are 32bit windows code only. Some people just run the few problem programs in a 32bit chroot and deal with it that way, which seems to make a lot of sense. I suspect pretty soon these problems will go away, although it may not happen until windows users finally get with the program and start doing 64bit there. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
