Recommendations...

Gerry Hull gerry at telosity.com
Tue Jun 15 14:29:59 EDT 2010


This is why I LOVE this list -- lots of great feedback.

I'll go w/64-bit (trying it w/the live-CD first), and probably Virtualbox.

BTW, I bought the X61 for $250, in mint condition, from Craigslist.  Pretty
good deal for a decent dual-core box.

Thanks!

Gerry

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> On 06/15/2010 01:48 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:
> > It is true that a 32-bit machine can only access 4GB, and sometimes even
> > less than that (depending on how the application address space is
> > organized) in one *virtual* address space, but this does not necessarily
> > stop the kernel from "using all of RAM".  It is just that various parts
> > of multiple virtual address spaces get mapped into the physical memory
> > of the machine.  It was this concept that allowed the old PDP-11s, which
> > had only a 64K memory address space (128K with separate "instruction"
> > and "data" address spaces) utilize all of the physical memory on
> > machines that had multiple megabytes of RAM.
> >
> > So even a "32-bit" OS could fully utilize the real memory of a 64-bit
> > CPU machine having multiple gigabytes of RAM if its memory management
> > software allows....it is just that the applications are limited to a
> > 32-bit space at one time.
> >
> The Linux 32-bit kernel supports PAE (the extension that allows access
> to more than 3GB RAM).  The other issue with 32-bit is with 32-but
> applications as they are also limited in virtual space.  One of the
> things I tested a few years ago was performance. Some applications and
> benchmarks ran faster in 32-bit mode than in 64-bit mode, but some will
> run faster in 64-bit mode. My testing was on both 32-bit and 64-bit
> Linux on X86/X86_64 as well as Linux on IA64. The X86_64 benchmarks beat
> the IA64 in many cases.
>
> Some technical advantages of a 64-bit kernel is that the X86_64 chips
> use linear addressing in 64-bit mode where 32-bit is segmented. There
> are some other chip related advantages that make a 64-bit Linux OS
> perform better than the same OS in 32-bit mode. Graphics performance is
> also better in 64-bit mode.
>
> --
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
> PGP key id: 537C5846
> PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
>
>
>
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