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64-bit new - 64-bit old64-bit new - 64-bit oldPosted Apr 15, 2004 1:54 UTC (Thu) by freeio (guest, #9622)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor goes 64-bit We can be thankful that some years ago, John "Maddog" Hall convinced DEC to provide an Alpha box to Linus, so many 64-bit issues were solved way back then. Because there have been a continuous stream of (less popular) 64-bit processors which run Linux, the 64-bit code base has matured quite nicely. This is being written on the currently cheapest of the 64-bit boxes, a 333 MHz Sun Ultra 5, which is running Aurora Linux 1.0 (a port based on RH 7.3 with later kernels and patches). The 64-bit code is mostly limited to kernel space, though, because it adds so little utility on a system which maxes out at 1GB of memory. When I rebuilt apache on our 270 MHz Ultra 5, I compiled it for 64-bit, and it works just fine. The capability to compile 64-bit applications is there, but really there is no advantage for most applications and most users. If one had a Sun 64-bit box that could hold more memory, then perhaps it would be of more beneift. So hurrah for the 64-bit i86 family processors, which will bring 64-bit processing to the masses. And hurrah for the mainstream 64-bit Linux distributions, which are available _today_. None of this niche stuff anymore! Marty
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64-bit new - 64-bit old Posted Apr 16, 2004 4:46 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] The Linux kernel is only a tiny fraction of the code in a typical distribution. Free software has been addressing 64-bit portability long before Linus got around to it (both in the GNU and BSD camps), which is why Linus had a good-quality 64-bit compiler for the Alpha when he started the port.
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