As a full IA-32 environment will no longer readily be available as an
off-the-shelf EL distribution (that is, the kernel is 64 bit, etc.), a
practical question:
how much additional RAM and hard drive space is required by this X86-64
implementation?
This is not an issue for our fixed workstations and servers, but it is
for our laptop workstations (all of which have X86-64 CPUs of some
generation). I know that the increase is more than a multiplier of one
and less than a multiplier of two, and I know that in most cases, a 64
bit implementation can be "shoehorned" into the same resources as used
by a 32 bit implementation, but "shoehorned" is not the same as
effective use.
I am asking for practical, observed data, not theoretical
calculations. We need to plan for the upgrade/replacement of
workstation laptops (e.g., more RAM, larger hard drives).
Yasha Karant
On 07/08/2014 01:59 AM, Stephan Wiesand wrote:
On 2014-07-08, at 10:19, Jim McCarthy <[email protected]> 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 ?
If no more IA-32 support, what would it take to convince the binutils (?)
development powers-that-be to make available for X86-64 the ld linker option
"-taso" (truncated address space option). Back in the day [1], this option
existed on Red Hat Linux for DEC Alpha, and the net effect on that 64-bit
machine was to create an executable in which memory addresses were
restricted to the lower 32-bits of address space. Legacy source code that
used 32-bit (4-byte) integers as pointers to memory addresses could
therefore be compiled (in gcc, the "-Wl,-taso" option would pass "-taso"
along to the linker), built, and run on the 64-bit machine, albeit without
taking advantage of the additional memory address space available on the
64-bit machine (e.g., the DEC Alpha processor family).
Most unfortunately, the ia64 (Itanium) binutils ld linker never had this
feature that appears to have withered away with Linux for DEC Alpha, nor has
the X86-64 binutils ld linker had this feature either. So in my case I've
been hanging onto IA-32 as my SL platform-of-choice. But if IA-32 is no
longer going to be offered, might there be value in resuscitating the
"-taso" option for the linker in X86-64 ? From my perspective this only has
an upside, for those that want/need it ... is there a hidden downside I
don't see ?
The toolchain builds ia32 executables (gcc -m32 , ld -m elf_i386).
And unlike ia64, x86_64 runs them without performance penalty.
