Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* James D. Parra [08-13-07 16:37]:

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From what I've read, software written for a 32 bit Intel chipset may not work on a AMD64 chipset. I've seen many posts on this list where, for example, 32 bit Firefox modules do not work on a 64 bit system. I came here to get clarification.

Funny, I have x86_64 SMP 4200+ Dual and run 32bit Firefox and modules w/o any problem. The problem is when running 64bit Firefox and 32bit modules.

I have not found any 32bit software that causes any problem, when used properly, ie: firefox.

iianm, x86_64 is backward compatable with x86_32, must be anyway. You say you are running 32bit on a 64bit arch (I don't know why, it's like having 4GB of memory and leaving 2GB in the desk drawer.

Bad analogy! 32 bits linux fits quite nicely on x86_64 hardware! Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* joe [08-13-07 17:41]:

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Patrick Shanahan wrote:

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iianm, x86_64 is backward compatable with x86_32, must be anyway. You say you are running 32bit on a 64bit arch (I don't know why, it's like having 4GB of memory and leaving 2GB in the desk drawer. Bad analogy!

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32 bits linux fits quite nicely on x86_64 hardware!

I believe that's what I said?

Your statement seemed to imply wasted capacity. I recently nuked a troublesome x86_46 install on a new system I had set up for a startup business, did a fresh install of linux i386 (same exact distro) and restored the data from the previous install. In addition to finally getting the 3rd party odbc drivers working, the wan download speed was also drastically improved (don't ask me why, perhaps some obscure driver issue with that particular ethernet card?). In addition, when I hammered the apache server with some quick and dirty benchmark tests, I found that the performance difference between i386 and x86_64 was pretty much down in the noise. Either way, local ab2 tests showed a capacity to serve about 23,000 requests per second for small files, fairly independent of concurrency, i.e. the results were pretty much level between 16 and 512 concurrent requests. In any case, in moving from x86_64 to 136 there was no wasted capacity that I could discern, and things just worked better all around. Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* joe [08-13-07 18:22]:

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Your statement seemed to imply wasted capacity.

It is, but not for reading email or web serving which you allude.

I don't recall ever making any mention of reading email, but naturally that and other desktop activities are at least as good on linux32 as on linux64, and that's no surprise to anyone. What I did think worthy of note was that the web server performance ceiling on common 64-bit hardware is not measurably different between linux32 and linux64. I would go so far as to agree that on high end hardware (16 CPUs, 64 GB RAM) linux64 would scale better than linux32, but the hardware you see in 98% of the business scenarios today is just not that extreme. Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org