On Fri, 1 Apr 2016, Benny Siegert wrote:
I just took the GENERIC kernel, modified one line to enable PAE and then
rebooted my i7 with 24G of RAM. I'm using NetBSD 7.0 i386.
This may not be the point, but: If you have that much RAM, why do you
use a 32-bit kernel in the first place?
I know what you mean, but I have one lame-but-valid reason: wine. It
doesn't work on NetBSD AMD64 but rather it works only on i386. I hate this
fact, but I use it a lot. There are several little windows programs that
do specialized things that are pretty "must have" for me on this specific
system (I'm not willing to justify or rationalize to others why I need
this - just understand it's must-have in my use-case). Running them over
VNC or something like that isn't an option for these specific apps. They
need to run on my machine at near-native speed locally.
That reminds me, I wish there was something like a "SunPC" card for a
regular old PC. That way I could run Windows or some other heinous crap
natively on the little PCIe card, while leaving my "real" OS untouched.
Anyone ever hear of such a thing? I've seen little transputers but nothing
you can pass through a VGA display from ala the SunPC card for Solaris.
In benchmarks for Go, the devs found that 64-bit code gives a 10-15%
speedup across the board. This is because there are more processor
registers in 64-bit mode, so more variables can be kept in registers.
I don't doubt it a bit. I normally run AMD64 on most machines, but I have
the one that needs to run Wine and when it only sees 2GB of RAM the box
will swap even just compiling stuff in pkgsrc. I'm using an SSD and I
don't want it to swap (write cycles). So, I want the extra RAM to work so
I don't run into swapping issues.
-Swift
