On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 05:12:16PM +0200, Ronny Meeus wrote: > Do you have any clue (rough) on the amount of effort this change would cost? David Daney's reply should give you more information for an estimate. > About the limited gain we can discuss: if you have a large application > that has been created assuming 32bit and it needs to be ported to a > 64bit architecture, I think the effort can be huge and the risk for > forgetting things is high. It will be very hard to check whether the > system behaves well under all conditions. A 64-bit port could start right away without the delay of waiting for a usable N32-4GB. Added benefit - with N64 you can grow beyond the 3GB. Downside, due to larger pointers thus better cache locality 32-bit code generally performs better. And I agree that verification of N32-4GB probably is easier than for a large application that wasn't written with the intend of 64-bit support. In my past as a contractor I've dealth with a few customers who were trying to avoid going 64-bit at all cost. They had to pay that cost ... Ralf
