On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 12:31 -0400, Will Woods wrote: > On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 17:18 +0100, Mary Ellen Foster wrote: > > 2009/4/17 John Summerfield <debian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > > > Do you have an objection to running 64-bit Fedora? It obsoletes PAE, and > > > your applications can see all available RAM, not just the 4 Gbytes 32-bit > > > addresses give. > > > > I've never tried 64-bit -- does it provide any concrete benefits? I've > > always been a bit intimidated by all of the posts about multilib > > craziness, and it didn't seem like it would be worth it ... :) > > Yeah - as I understand it, identical code often runs faster when > compiled for x86_64, just because i386 is just so starved for > registers. In practice you're not likely to notice any difference in day-to-day operation of most apps, but it certainly doesn't hurt. > There are some other benefits too - for example, hardware NX protection > is always available, so there's no weirdo software workarounds required > to protect you from buffer overflows and the like. > > The only place it gets tricky is when you start trying to deal with > closed-source binaries, which are typically i386-only. But the most > common example - Adobe Flash - is available in a native Linux x86_64 > binary these days. > > And, if it really comes down to it, you can still run 32-bit binaries > thanks to the wonder and magic[1] of multilib. > > If your hardware's capable I really can't think of a good reason to > avoid x86_64 anymore. You can't run hv3! Not without manually installing a messy chain of i586 packages, anyway. OK, that's not a very good reason =) There used to be a lot of pain associated with running x86-64, which is why people tended to steer clear of it, but these days it's really not a big problem. And it's The Future, so we should probably encourage people to do so. Don't kid yourself that it'll make everything twice as fast, though, it doesn't. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-test-list mailing list fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list
