On Tuesday 19 December 2006 14:28, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Why on earth must you be so rude?
Pot/Kettle. But it wasn't my intent.
And how, exactly, is the kernel that's running my system just fine, "wrong?"
Its not the native kernel for that hardware. As for your theory, a quick look at the clock times will reveal that the 64bit registers load in the same number of clocks as the 32. And the 64bit address registers, pointer registers, etc also load in the same number of clocks as the 32 bit registers. So moving stuff around in memory is faster doing so in 64bit chunks. The reason for 64bit processors is NOT simply address space. Drive controllers move data to memory at what ever speed and chunk size they are designed to use, but your access to that data in 32bit chunks that take just as long to load as 64bit chunks is slower because it takes more clocks. Look, I've done this exact same thing, loaded the i386 kernel on a Pentium D (also a 64bit dual well processor, in spite of the Pentium name). Since it was a new server with no mission data installed I re-installed using the correct kernel, and it was significantly faster with the 64bit kernel. I did not bench long running applications, or time long compiles, just running yast, kde, and some database loading. Since it runs at init 3 most of the time the 32bit would have worked, and might have gone un-noticed. But it was faster launching applications in 64bit, and the time to load the sql database from raw files was also faster, 37 minutes compared to 52. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen