On Saturday 09 September 2006 19:06, Tony Pelton wrote: > i don't know if FlightGear is 64 bit clean ? > > that would be issue #1.
I can confirm that FG is 64 bit clean. I run it almost every day on my machine. It is solid and builds cleanly on an amd64 machine with gcc 3.4.x and 4.1.x. The same is true for the libraries that it uses and is also true for at least 95% of the stuff that you could run on a linux box. I should add that I have reported a few amd64 specific bugs to various developers over that last two years and in almost every case they corrected the problems in short order since in most cases the things that prevented the app from building or running as a 64 bit app were minor. > > i recently built my NEW AMD-64 x2, and am using Kubuntu. > > when i was doing my research, deciding if i should go with the 64 bit > OS, it seemed to be pretty clear to me from my research, and from > others posting to various boards askings the 64 bit question, that 64 > bit is really still kind of a pain for "user" desktop machines. A year ago there was some validity to the above statement but at this point the "pain" level is down to a few minor annoyances. At this time the only areas that still need work are some video codecs and flash and both of these are easily handled with 32 bit executables. Go to the AMD64 section of the Gentoo forums where the "should I run 32 bit or 64 bit?" question is asked on an almost daily basis and you will find that almost everyone who is running a 64 bit system says to run a 64 bit OS with the caveat that there are still a handful of things that must be run in 32 bit mode. This thread http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-466544.html is typical with only one person saying to not use 64 bit on two pages of posts going back to March of 2006. I also think this depends on the distro to some extent. Gentoo is solid and I have heard that the same is true for SuSE, which was the first distro shipped with 64 bit support, which might actually have a better 32 bit emulation layer then Gentoo. So ask this question on a forum specific to the distro you want to run and if you are not a diehard user of a specific distro check out some options to find one that you like that has good amd64 support if your current disto does not. The nay sayers are almost exclusively those who are not running a 64 bit system. > > finding software is more of a hassle, and trying to do 32 bit/64 bit > libraries and layers is a hassle. This needs to be evaluated based on the apps that you run. Almost everything that you will want to use is already 64 bit clean and being shipped as such by the distros. So "finding software" is for the most part a non-issue and is definitely not a hassle. The few things that are not 64 bit capable are supported through the 32 bit compatibility layer and 32 bit versions of the apps. Many distros now have a solid 32 bit compatibility layer and the number of issues with this are minimal. The biggest issue is with apps that are only available as binaries. Win32Codecs, Flash and VueScan are three examples and all will run out of the box as 32 bit apps on SuSE. On Gentoo VueScan requires two hand installed 32 bit libraries and the others work out of the box. Also OpenOffice does not currently build on a 64 bit system but the 32 bit binaries run just fine and every distro shipping in 64 bit is setup to run OpenOffice 32 bit out of the box. OpenOffice 2.1 is supposed to have the 64 bit build issues fixed when it ships. One easy way to figure out if your apps will work on an amd64 machine in 64 bit mode is to go to the Gentoo packages database http://packages.gentoo.org/ and look up your apps. In the amd64 column if you see a + or a ~ then you are good to go. A + means that the app is considered stable and fully tested and a ~ means the devs have tested it and that they want users to test it before marking it stable. I have yet to have an issue with an app marked ~ (testing). Out of about 600 apps/libraries installed on my machine perhaps a dozen are marked ~amd64. FlightGear is one of these. I should also add that many that are not marked +amd64 or ~amd64 will still build and run on an amd64 machine. This just means that no one has tested this specific app yet. > > and many people seemed to make the same comment, that generally, they > didn't feel like there was much sense of a big gain for the trouble Typically apps will run 15% to 25% faster in 64 bit mode on the same hardware. Some, like those that use 64 bit integers or that do lots of floating math using doubles, will see larger improvements in performance. I remember seeing one test with an encoding app that did lots of computations that involved 64 bit integers being 400% faster in 64 bit mode on the same hardware. This was likely a special case but the point is that a few apps will see dramatic performance gains. For most desktop apps the 15% to 25% difference may not be noticeable simply because most of these apps do not bottle neck on the CPU. So how much of the improvement you can actually see/feel depends on what apps you are running and how much any of these bottle neck on the CPU. GCC runs about 30% faster in 64 bit mode and feels significantly faster. For developers this could be a significant reason to run 64 bit. By the way GCC 4.1 runs slower than gcc 3.4 but produces smaller slightly faster executables. Hal ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
