On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, apostolos pantazis wrote: > These days it seems to be getting harder and harder finding quality > support under 32 BIT; In some cases vendors have flat out specified > that the future of support under 32 BIT is grim. Yet the enterprises > of the world are still running 32 BIT and I am wondering: what is your > experience in regards to the future of 32 BIT? These days 64 BIT > hardware seems cheap enough almost making it tempting to begin > thinking about a migration. The Linux Kernel is mature enough in its > 64 bit state to support enterprise grade loads. what is everybody > doing out there? I am trying to get a feel for the direction of the > industry. Is is too early for 64 bit? your input is appreciated.
for the host OS, I go 64 bit everywhere. with anything over a couple of gig of ram you gain stability by being able to ditch 'high memory/PAE/etc' and the various work-arounds for it, and the x86 architecture is register starved, so getting twice as many registers in 64 bit mode usually outweighs any performance hit from larger code size. for userspace, I go 64 bit on my servers where I can, but the support for 32 bit userspace is good, so I don't worry if there's a reson to include 32 bit code. things can get a bit interesting if you try and run both 32 bit and 64 bit userspace code, but mostly it's when you have 32 bit things trying to talk binary protocols to 64 bit things (including plugin APIs), so mixing a 64 bit browser with a 32 bit flash plugin is painful (that particular case has known work-arounds so most distros will support it out of the box, but other things like that will give you grief) if you have a binary 32 bit application, I would not worry about running it on an otherwise 64 bit system from a reliability point of view. it can be a bit more work to get it installed as the package managers don't really understand the mixed mode. there is usually a 32 bit compatibility library (ia32libs or something like that on debian systems) that covers the basics, but if you need a lot of libraries you may be better going with a 32 bit userspace. if you have a server running many different things, or with <4G of ram, 32 bit userspace isn't going to hurt you, but if your server is dedicated to one particular app and you have lots of ram you will really want to go with 64 bit userspace (or if your app will significantly benifit from the extra registers) David Lang _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
