Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 14, 2012 4:48 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (guest, #32913)
Parent article: Quotes of the week

"Why the f*ck are you running i386 on your nice shiny new x86_64 machine"

Because I build my own kernels, one of my 3 machines is *not* an x86_64, and I want to only build one kernel per release.

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Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 14, 2012 15:16 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (1 responses)

So you cripple your other two machines to satisfy one?

I would suggest setting up distcc or icecream (you have 3 machines) and build a x86_64 kernel as well for the x86_64 machines. It makes the build go much faster. And you wont even need to do anything special as the userspace is all i386 anyway. But if the boxes are not all the same distro, you can use my guide to build your own gcc's for distcc kernel compiling:

http://rostedt.homelinux.com/distcc/

It's a little out of date, but should still be useful to help you set up.

32 bit kernel on 64 bit CPU

Posted Jun 16, 2012 23:53 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

So you cripple your other two machines to satisfy one?

Sure, that's reasonable. It's like having a 10G disk drive and a 15G disk drive and not using 5G of the larger drive so you can use them as a mirrored pair.

I too maintain a single kernel binary that I run on lots of systems. Many of them even access the same actual file, over the network. Some are capable of running 32 or 64 bit and others only 32 bit. The extra speed I'd get out of the 64 bit machines, in my case, would not justify the extra maintenance effort of having two kernels.

And note that there's no hypocrisy here. I never intended to have full x86_64 speed when I acquired the x86_64 machines; That feature is just an unwanted by-product.