On 08/29/2015 05:51 AM, Michal Kubecek wrote:
The reminds me the argument that we shouldn't switch to IPv6 because routing tables would need more memory which would make routers more expensive. Memory prices (in e.g. dollars per MB) have dropped by several orders since the argument started to appear back in the 90's but the mantra keeps being repeated until today and will be repeated on and on.
Part of that problem was caused the the mess that is IPv4 routing. When IPv4 addresses were handed out, little or no thought was given to hierarchal addressing, so routing tables are huge. With IPv6, this problem has generally been avoided. So, even though the addresses are longer, the routing tables tend use less memory.
It's the same here: my first 64-bit machine built in 2003 or 2004 had 2GB of RAM (perhaps even 1GB, I'm not sure); my strongest machine today (built in the end of 2012) has 32GB - and I might have actually paid less for these 32 GB than for those 2GB back in 2003 (certainly not much more). That's factor of 16 and I hope even you will agree that's much more than the ratio between x86_64 and i586 memory consumption.
I bought my first 64 bit mom board about 9 years ago.
At one moment, you simply need to bite the bullet and switch. Otherwise, you will keep repeating the "bigger memory consumption" mantra even if, from the long term perspective, it gets more and more ridiculous. The reward of getting rid of all the low/high mem trickery, vmalloc area limited to ~130 MB, limited register and instruction set or inefficient parameter passing (and I surely forgot a lot more) is worth it.
This is often the case where reluctance to change results in hanging on to something that's so obsolete it causes problems. I often hear from people who, rather than switch to IPv6, hacks on top of hacks, to extend IPv4 is the way to go, not understanding that those hacks tend to break things. BTW, I've been running IPv6 for over 5 years. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org