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Article Path: Home: Computers and Technology: Linux and BSD on the Desktop: Desktop FreeBSD: 64-bit Future

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Suggesting that a 64bit OS can make your soundcard produce better sound?
You sir, are an idiot.

I think this is a good informative article.

You Jan, are are an obnoxious idiot yourself.

This article contains glaring technical errors.
The author obviously has overrated himself.

I love FreeBSD and I have 4 machines configured with -CURRENT or -STABLE but I’m with Jan on that one…

Funny, my old/homebuilt 1.2 AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) just died, and yesterday I was looking on Dell’s website; I found the E521 - an AMD64 3200+ / 512Megs DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz / 80Gig SATA / DVD-ROM drive - for 319$ (just remove the flat panel from the options). What the hell is that? I am going to run Ubuntu AMD64 on it, but now I think I’ll dual boot FreeBSD 6.1 alongside, as I think these boxes are way underrated, what with ever annoying Intel commercial telling everyone that they need a Dual-Core 2 to ‘do more’! Like they need that kind of horse power to check email and view news online…

My home server is FreeBSD 6.0 (no gui) and I couldn’t be happier with it. Ubuntu is my desk, but with a new box and plenty of HD space, I will try out F*BSD64 too. Thanks for the timely write up!

P

Couldn’t find 32-bit hardware? Where were you, Oklahoma City, North Korea?

Try calling Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. Or, here’s a nickel, go to pricewatch.com and find more 32-bit hardware than you can shake a non-32-bit-working sound card at.

There is nothing beta about FreeBSD’s amd64 support; amd64 is a tier 1 platform, along with i386, sparc64 and pc98.

Beyond that, I have to agree with Jan here, although I wouldn’t phrase it so strongly; the author seems to have only a superficial understanding of computer technology.

Ed, 64 bits are not automatically better than 32. 64-bit software is up to twice as large and uses up to twice as much memory as the equivalent 32-bit software, and will therefore generally run slower on the same hardware unless it is designed to take advantage of the increased address space. Office software will not benefit much; software that manipulates large amounts of data (image manipulation, CAD/CAM, RDBMS) will. Finally, a 64-bit CPU will usually have more cache and more memory bandwidth than a comparable 32-bit CPU, so it will run memory-intensive software (both 32-bit or 64-bit) faster.

DES, 64-bit software is NOT twice as large. Why? Because the only the pointers are twice as large — 8 bytes up from 4. But a four byte int is still four bytes, an 8 byte unsigned long is still 8 bytes, and the string “Hello World” does not magically inflate from 12 bytes to 24. I have two packages of rhythmbox right here. The i386 version is 3.6 Megs (compressed), while the AMD64 version is a whopping 3.7. This is typical, and by no means an exception.

General rule of thumb: 64-bits is not just two times 32-bit.

Adam, that depends on your architecture. On a RISC platform, 64-bit software is twice as large as 32-bit software, because all instructions are exactly 64 bits long. On a CISC platform, some instructions will be longer and some will not; that is why I wrote “*up* to twice as large” (reading skills aren’t what they used to be, eh?)

Memory usage, however, will grow quite a bit, because most applications store data in fairly small structures with plenty of pointers. Stack usage will also increase significantly.

… what is so hard to understand? Performance of a sound card can be effected by the driver. It’s very possible that 64bit driver/kernel might produce better sound than the same card running on a 32bit system.

Anyone is welcome to write their own article for submission, and refute anything or everything I’ve written above. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get accepted. Thin-skinned I am not. Meanwhile, I would suggest people who actually read what I wrote may not draw quite the same conclusions as some of you folks. Many of you react to things I didn’t say.

Adam- good call, except ‘int’ is the register size the OS supports; on a 32-bit OS it will be 4B, on a 64-bit OS it will be 8B. This would cause a size increase in built-in ‘int’ or pointer constants/initializers, which is still menial, however.

Adam, and others,

maybe 10 times more if you loaded with 64 x window compare to win32 or apple 8205 chips …. yeah ?

free lane agent, 10/23/06 passing through

Unfortunatly some essential (to me) packages do not work with freebsd/amd64, like vmware3 (I need to run some windows applications). Other things I like to have is opera, flash7, win32-codecs for mplayer and xine. Is openoffice already working on freebsd/amd64?
I also found out linux/i386 emulation on freebsd6.0/amd64 is less stable than on freebsd/i386 (don’t know if it has improved on 6.1), running the linux version of openoffice 2 caused a system crash.

Does amd64, compared to i386, really gain much performance? You already wrote, probably not, except for certain math stuff and compiling. It would be interresting to see some real benchmark results between a CPUTYPE=k8 32bit environment and amd64 64bit environment on the same hardware.
It is also not clear how much extra memory (and less important diskspace) 64bit software uses compared to 32bit equivalents. It is uses (much) more it could be a disadvantage.

Unfortunatly the FreeBSD/amd64 kernel is not fully supporting a 32bit userland, like linux and solaris does.
In my opinion it would be more desirable if only the parts of the operating system that could gain profit of 64bit computing become 64bit and leave the other stuff 32bit.
I think a 64bit kernel for > 4GB memory address space and some 64bit libaries for some userland software that really gain performance in 64bit mode is sufficient, and leave the other stuff 32bit. This is AFAIK also the way Solaris is distributed (correct me if I’m wrong).

I’ve written above. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get accepted. Thin-skinned I am not. Meanwhile, I would suggest people who actually read what I wrote may not draw quite the same conclusions as some of you folks. Many of you react to things I didn’t say.

But a four byte int is still four bytes, an 8 byte unsigned long is still 8 bytes, and the string “Hello World” does not magically inflate from 12 bytes to 24. I have two packages of rhythmbox right here. The i386 version is 3.6 Megs, while the AMD64 version is a whopping

I’m more interested is taking 64bit versions of PostgreSQL 8.3, MySQL 5.x and FireBirdSQL for a spin to see how they fare against their 32bit cousins. Database apps are a great spot for performance improvements.

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The Disaster of the Rolling Release

By Ed Hurst

I've always enjoyed exploring. Every time I've moved from one residence to another, I've always wandered around my new neighborhood, simply to see what was there. It's the same with computer technology. I love poking around operating systems. Lately, one aspect of this has gotten tiring in every Open Source operating system: the rolling release. The phrase refers to the sometimes feverish effort to add new features, long before the old ones even work properly.

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