On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Brad Knowles wrote: > on 3/16/09 5:46 PM, apostolos pantazis said: > >> 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. > > It depends on what you're doing. Some applications have not yet been > ported to 64-bit, and may not run correctly on a machine that has a > 64-bit kernel. Other applications may run better in 64-bit mode. You > need to know your specific application.
do you have any specific examples? the last usespace program that I ran into with this sort of bug was the ipchains binary, and that was fixed several years ago. I could see this happening with programs that tie themselves very closely to the kernel, but there aren't very many that do that sort of thing. > > In our case, we're building an authentication/access management system > on top of some commercial software from RSA, and there are many, many > different little fiddly bits that perform different functions. They are > designed so that you can run each of them on a different set of machines > (and in clusters), for maximum scalability. However, one critical > component has not yet been ported to 64-bit, while the vendor is telling > us that certain other components are about to go away in 32-bit mode and > will be 64-bit only. > > So, if you want to run all these components on the same platform, you > are well and truly screwed. > > > We had previously tried going all 64-bit for this application, but then > ran into a problem once we were almost done, and were told by the vendor > that running in 64-bit mode was not supported and they wouldn't provide > any further assistance. It took us a year-and-a-half to step back from > RHEL5/64-bit mode to RHEL4/32-bit mode, and then to get back to where we > were before. yeah, the politics of vendor support can be a much bigger problem than any technical issues. > Hardware-wise, we buy 64-bit machines, and for x86 platforms we specify > AMD Opteron processors so that we have a much better memory architecture > to work with, and if we need to run the systems in 32-bit mode, then we > do so. We don't try to run in mixed mode, because that doesn't seem to > work so well. > > My hope is that within a couple of years or so, we'll be able to sunset > all of our 32-bit mode systems, and have exclusively 64-bit mode machines. I've been going down this path for a few years and am just about to drop the last of the 32 bit machines. 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/
