Even if I got rid of my last 32-bit system on a physical machine more than five years ago, I agree that we shouldn't drop i586 support in OpenSuSE yet. For example, for last few versions I've been seeding OpenSuSE images via bittorent and 13.1 is the first where I have significantly bigger share ratio for x86_64 image than for i586 one. So far, the ratio is about 2:1, even for 12.3 the difference was only marginal. Personally, I consider this quite sad but I think we can't ignore the fact that a lot of our users keep using i586 for various reasons even if then don't need to. That being said... On Sat, Dec 07, 2013 at 09:56:18PM +0100, Stefan Seyfried wrote:
64bit is never faster. It just allows to address more memory, but unless you need to address way more than a few GB, it does not bring any benefits.
On the other hand, I really don't think we should use claims like this to support keeping of i586 because everyone can simply check that this is far from being true. For example, let's take the openssl binary from our 12.3 package (x86_64 and i586) and run "openssl speed rsa1024" (on the same system): x86_64: sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 1024 bits 0.000221s 0.000014s 4517.3 72704.6 i586: sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 1024 bits 0.000890s 0.000044s 1123.2 22788.6 There _are_ benefits of x86_64 and x86_64 is sometimes faster than i586 - and sometimes it is _way_ faster than i586. And you don't need applications using gigabytes of memory. On x86_64, we can process more data in one instruction and we have more registers available - which is also reflected in much more efficient ABI. Michal Kubeček -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org