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Pettenò: Debunking x32 mythsPettenò: Debunking x32 mythsPosted Jun 26, 2012 2:52 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071)In reply to: Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths by slashdot Parent article: Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths
These days "little RAM" is still often 265MB or more. x32 kernels would be a rather short term proposition given that the comfortable limit of 32-bit is 2GB, and maximum is 4GB, only 8-9 times less than that limit.
Even phones and tablets are pushing the 2GB mark.
Sure, truly small embedded Linux devices continue to exist and will for a long time to come. They're rarely x86 or x64, and aren't likely to be, so x32 is irrelevant for them.
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Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths Posted Jun 26, 2012 3:37 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
x32 can use almost 4Gb _per_ _process_, it's not limited to 2Gb since there's no user/kernel address space split (kernel is completely 64-bit). And 4GB _per_ _process_ is still pretty big. Even most of games use less RAM (thanks to RAM-starved consoles).
Right now the biggest process on my development machine is a Java process running IntelliJ IDEA with a large project (about 1MLOC) opened. It's a whopping 600Mb monster using 1096Mb of address space.
Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths Posted Jun 26, 2012 5:04 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] The context probably got lost as it's several parent posts up. I wasn't referring to x32 in general being pointless, but to the development of an x32 kernel. I don't see the notion of a kernel that lives in the lower 4GB and uses mostly 32-bit pointers while using the native x64 mode to be particularly useful. I can maybe see x32 with a 64-bit kernel, which is the only thing the x32 folks ever proposed, being useful.
Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths Posted Jun 26, 2012 6:24 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Oh, yes, sorry.
Of course, I completely agree with you given the context of x32 kernel.
Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths Posted Jun 26, 2012 7:26 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
The hilarious part here is that I'm pretty sure that poster was simply talking about the kernel maintainers accepting the x32 personality (necessary for an x86_64 kernel to run x32 programs). :)
Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths Posted Jun 27, 2012 16:05 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
No, I actually think an x32 native kernel (or the equivalent for ARM64) would be an excellent idea for a large class of embedded systems - routers and file servers in particular. It would also be promising for use with hosted virtual machines, where the impact of running dozens of kernels starts to add up.
Pettenò: Debunking x32 myths Posted Jun 26, 2012 3:38 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
one thing you are missing, you use x32 with a 64 bit kernel, so the kernel doesn't have memory limits, your only limit is 4G of address space per process (and the kernel needs almost none of that)
As a result, any system up to 4G is perfectly happy as x32, and if the system is doing more than one thing, you could easily get 16G or larger systems without needing 64 bit binaries.
And if you are doing VMs, this is the size of the VM, not the size of the overall system.
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