[mdlug] Time to jump to 64-bit?

[Paul]

"Ingles, Raymond" <Raymond.Ingles at compuware.com>, on Thu Oct 29, 2009 [12:44:29 PM] said:
> My main system is Athlon X2 based, quite capable of running 64-bit
> Linux. But I've been sticking with 32-bit versions for now. I only have
> 2GB RAM in there anyway.
> 
>  I understand that the 64-bit instruction set has extra registers and
> such, which can provide a boost of a few percentage points in some
> tasks. But I've heard that there's problems with Flash support, and I
> use Wine and some emulator stuff to run older Windows games. Overall, I
> don't know if the benefits of 64-bit would outweigh the drawbacks in my
> case.
> 
>  Any opinions or suggestions?

	Hi;

	Well, Ive been running an athlon x2 system in native 64 bit
for the better part of a year now, with no problems. The 32 bit
libraries even make 32 bit programs I compiled 9 years ago just
work. Even the proprietary ATI fglrx driver works fine. (well, much
like flash, your definition of 'fine' may vary...)
	Not sure if there are any real advantages to you with a
64 bit userspace with your workload . Some people like to run a
64 bit kernel with a 32 bit userspace if they have a lot of
memory. But I personally havent noticed any downsides to running
amd64 native, unless you want to complain about disk space used
by 32 bit libraries and what I suspect are generally larger
64 bit binaries.

Paul
set at pobox.com

ps. for the sake of completeness, this is a Foxconn A7DA-S mb, with
an athlon-x2 5050e, an onboard ati radeon hd3300 with sideport memory,
and 4gig of ram.