On 07/08/2014 10:31 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
On Tue, Jul 08, 2014 at 01:19:58AM -0700, Jim McCarthy wrote:
On Mon, 7 Jul 2014, Connie Sieh wrote:
I note that only X86-64 is available; have I missed something about
supported ISAs, or will there also be an IA-32 port/distribution as
well?
Yasha Karant
TUV is only releasing X86-64 .
-Connie Sieh
Is this for TUV "v7 ALPHA", or is this to become 'the new normal' going
forward ?
My best guess is - there is no 32-bit RHEL7 because "they" decided to use the
XFS filesystem by default, but XFS only works on 64-bit systems (something about stack
size or page size or something obscure like that).
It's worse than just 'not working.'
It's 'let's silently stop working when you pass 16TB of occupied space
on your 24TB filesystem and no longer even mount it on bootup.' (I ran
into this; nothing prevented me from making a 24TB XFS filesystem on EL5
i686, and I started backups onto it. Then one day the backup job just
stopped, and after a reboot the filesystem simply would not mount
anymore. It was a mad dash to reinstall x86_64 EL5 to get access back
to the backup filesystem, after researching the problem.) But it was
never really 'supported' by upstream anyway, and I don't remember the
package I used to gain xfs on 32-bit. Suffice to say it is very very
broken.
See Connie's post in the archives about the 4k-stacks issue; here's a
quick link:
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg05320.html
This is a wise decision if you consider that all serious UNIX machines went
64-bit back in the late-1990-ies (SGI, DEC, etc),
and that all new PC hardware is 64-bit capable.
Oddly enough Linux on SPARC64 typically uses a 32-bit userland even with
a 64-bit kernel, since on SPARC there is no performance improvement
going 64-bit; the only differences between 32-bit SPARC code and 64-bit
SPARC code are the size of the executable (64-bit is larger) and the
memory size that can be addressed per-process, being much greater with
64-bit code.
x86_64 is not just a 64-bit i686; there are many other improvements that
make 64-bit code run faster than equivalent 32-bit code.
And MIPS32 is still alive and kicking in the embedded Linux market.
