Re: i386 or x86_64 installation

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Peter Kjellstrom wrote:
On Monday 22 January 2007 17:05, Matt wrote:
What are advantages of 64 bit OS anyway?  I was thinking with i386 the
max RAM you could have was like 4 gigabyte or something?  64 bit
allows quite a bit more, right?

You can have alot of RAM even in a 32-bit system. However, there is also the issue of efficiency and applications being able to actually use alot of memory. Here are some random bits of information on the subject:

* you can have alot more than 4G on 32-bit with pae (hugemem kernels)
* ...but, already at ~900M 32-bit has to start using highmem
* ...which can cause problems for (old and badly designed) applications already at ~900M
* 32-bit EL kernels have 4K kernel stacks, 64-bit has 8K, affects eg. XFS

I am upgrading a very heavilly used email server to a AMD64 dual core
with CentOS.  I am staying with i386 since the web GUI we use lists
64bit support as beta and I do not want any problems.

Not a bad choice, software functionality is probably one of the biggest differences between 32- and 64-bit.

/Peter
Somebody feel free to slap me upside the head if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, you can utilize up to 16GB on the standard SMP kernel. The bigmem kernel allows
up to 64GB, IIRC.

I have no idea the RAM limits on the x86_64 kernel.  Didn't look.

Peter

--
Peter Serwe <peter at infostreet dot com>

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