linux-amd64.. not yet!
- Published November 17th, 2005 in Tech Comment, Free Software, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu
After assisting to the death of my P4 2.0Ghz I decided to buy an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (I’ll post further details on this subject for those interested in hardware). In fact, when I was much younger I was an hardware addicted, crazy for optimizing and overclocking. Looking again to an Athlon (actually, I had 2 Athlons and I definitely prefer them to Intel) revived the good old days :-) No tunning though, I hate those neon lighs.
Anyway, the CPU is great. Very fast and due to its dual core, even faster on multithreaded applications/systems. And its underlying architecture has changed. It is a x86-64 bits, no big news here. Apart from the changes in the registers (no more EAX, now we’re talking about 64 bits register, like ERA or ERI), it is quite faster since it can, theorically, process instructions that take more than 32 bits (but less then 64) in one single cycle.
One of the questions I posed to myself was: should I install a 64 bits GNU/Linux distribution (on this case, Ubuntu 64 bits). I took the chance but soon I disregarded this possibility. After checking out the forums I realized that it would mean extra-work. And since I use the computer as a mean and less as an end (well, as a Computer Science student is hard to differentiate) I quit and stick for the traditional Ubuntu Breezy 32 bits. Why? Flash doesn’t work nor does OpenOffice.org 2. I could live perfectly without Flash since I have my iMac right next to me, but I really need OpenOffice (not as much as I need LaTeX/LyX, but still, I need it). Nevertheless, it is possible to make 32 bits applications work under a 64 bits plataform. They have proved it right but I won’t take the chance. Every 32 bit application you want to run has to have the dependencies compiled for 32 bits installed as well!
But I would like to hear some comments about the subject. Have you been succcessful with an GNU/Linux compiled for amd64 architecture?
P.S. - Blame the manufacturers, not the Linux kernel
P.S. 2 - Windows XP 64 bits is even worst.
I would like to tell you about my experience on this field. I don’t know about ubuntu, however, Gentoo linux distribution has a great support for 64 bits. I’ve been running gentoo for some years now and last month I got it to run in a brand new amd-64 and although there are some specific applications which won’t work, there’s also some emulation packages that are almost transparent to the user (I say almost since… well, there’s no such thing as ‘user transparency’ on gentoo). Anyway, I can only say amd64 support in gentoo is very nice and I advise it. Have fun!
Well, I’ve spoken with several people regarding this issue, Gentoo is one of the best supported distros for amd64. But since I use much of my time compiling, I won’t lose it compiling the tools that I need to compile ;-) Call it a meta-compile. Anyway, this puts Gentoo out of question :/
For a desktop machine I don’t even see much benefit in a 64bit distro. You won’t notice it even if it turns out to be faster (which I doubt, you have the extra registers, but also some penalty in memory access - in 32bit you don’t have that penalty, but the registers are available in the back, through register renaming, so the sum turns out equal).
Anyway, don’t sweat it. Linux x86_64 on a server “yes” (I’ve been running it for some time now and it works flawlessly) but on the desktop “not yet”.
Yeap, that’s it. Seems fine for a server (you don’t need Flash, OpenOffice.org, etc..) but still unusable on the desktop :-)
I have a notebook with amd64 and I’m using slamd64. It works perfectly, including openoffice2.org and flash..So “I” can’t do it, does not automaticly mean that it can’t be done! And don’t forget: there’s a passenger for every train!