i386 vs amd64

[mike miskulin]

About to build a replacement system for an older i386 setup. A few
years ago I had tried the amd64 port on it and found it was frustrating
as things that just worked on i386 did not on amd64. IIRC ports were
large annoyance too.

Now I have a new system with 8GB, etc,etc and wonder if I am best off to
stick with i386 and PAE or is the amd64 version finally on a par or
close enough that I would not likely have many issues like in the past?

Thanks for your thoughts/(recent) experiences.



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[Fleuriot Damien]

On Nov 28, 2012, at 6:36 PM, mike miskulin <bird...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> About to build a replacement system for an older i386 setup. A few
> years ago I had tried the amd64 port on it and found it was frustrating
> as things that just worked on i386 did not on amd64. IIRC ports were
> large annoyance too.
>
> Now I have a new system with 8GB, etc,etc and wonder if I am best off to
> stick with i386 and PAE or is the amd64 version finally on a par or
> close enough that I would not likely have many issues like in the past?
>
> Thanks for your thoughts/(recent) experiences.

What port was that ?

I've never had a *single* problem due to using amd64 over i386.

From a professional point of view, we're using over 60 amd64 fbsd 8.0 8.1 8.2 and 8.3 boxes at work and they work just fine.


I for one can recommend the 64 bits version.

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012, mike miskulin wrote:

> About to build a replacement system for an older i386 setup. A few
> years ago I had tried the amd64 port on it and found it was frustrating
> as things that just worked on i386 did not on amd64. IIRC ports were
> large annoyance too.
>
> Now I have a new system with 8GB, etc,etc and wonder if I am best off to
> stick with i386 and PAE or is the amd64 version finally on a par or
> close enough that I would not likely have many issues like in the past?
>
> Thanks for your thoughts/(recent) experiences.

Do you use emulators/wine? If not, switch to amd64. In fact, even if
you do, switch to amd64 to use that 8G of memory. Building 32-bit Wine
on amd64 is a hassle, but packages are available and I think there is a
64-bit port on the way.

[mike miskulin]

> What port was that ?
>
> I've never had a *single* problem due to using amd64 over i386.

Well I have to apologize, I've reached senility! My past bad experience
was with netbsd amd64 afterwhich I bailed and went to FreeBSD i386
(thanks google).

But I guess the basic question remains - are there any considerations in
regards ports, linux emulation, etc that would sway me to remain i386?

Sorry about that!

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:53:26 -0500, mike miskulin wrote:
> But I guess the basic question remains - are there any considerations in
> regards ports, linux emulation, etc that would sway me to remain i386?

The only problem might be if you want to use wine. As it has
been said, there are binary packages (wine_amd64, if I remember
correctly), but the rest of the system should run good on
amd64 as it did on i386.

Sidenote: I switched back from 8.2/amd64 to 8.2/i386 because
of three reasons (in fact, two reasons and one justification):
I had problems with wine, problems with nVidia's driver (plus
a faulty GPU), and I only have 2 GB RAM. Anywhere else, I have
not experienced problems with amd64.


--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...

[Andrea Venturoli]

On 11/28/12 18:49, Warren Block wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Nov 2012, mike miskulin wrote:
>
>> About to build a replacement system for an older i386 setup. A few
>> years ago I had tried the amd64 port on it and found it was frustrating
>> as things that just worked on i386 did not on amd64. IIRC ports were
>> large annoyance too.
>>
>> Now I have a new system with 8GB, etc,etc and wonder if I am best off to
>> stick with i386 and PAE or is the amd64 version finally on a par or
>> close enough that I would not likely have many issues like in the past?
>>
>> Thanks for your thoughts/(recent) experiences.
>
> Do you use emulators/wine? If not, switch to amd64. In fact, even if
> you do, switch to amd64 to use that 8G of memory. Building 32-bit Wine
> on amd64 is a hassle, but packages are available and I think there is a
> 64-bit port on the way.

I heard valgrind is another... in case you are a developer.

bye
av.

[Rod Person]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:25:59 +0100
Polytropon <fre...@edvax.de> wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:53:26 -0500, mike miskulin wrote:
> > But I guess the basic question remains - are there any
> > considerations in regards ports, linux emulation, etc that would
> > sway me to remain i386?
>
> The only problem might be if you want to use wine. As it has
> been said, there are binary packages (wine_amd64, if I remember
> correctly), but the rest of the system should run good on
> amd64 as it did on i386.
>
> Sidenote: I switched back from 8.2/amd64 to 8.2/i386 because
> of three reasons (in fact, two reasons and one justification):
> I had problems with wine, problems with nVidia's driver (plus
> a faulty GPU), and I only have 2 GB RAM. Anywhere else, I have
> not experienced problems with amd64.
>
>

The nvidia driver works fine now.

Linux emulation is only 32 bit though.

--
Just because it can been done, does not mean it should be done.

[Bill Tillman]

________________________________
From: Fleuriot Damien <m...@my.gd>
To: bird...@yahoo.com
Cc: freebsd-...@freebsd.org
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: i386 vs amd64

I have been using amd64 for at least 5 years now on mulitple systems and I don't know of any troubles like you're defining. And if you're using 8 GB of RAM then why waste 4 GB. i386 will not see anything above 4 GB. I'd say at least give it a try before you relent.

[Jakub Lach]

If it was from me, my system is without 32bit compat
whatsoever, and this is not default setting on amd64.

Maybe on def. amd64 there are no problems, I don't
know, nobody replied to my thread.



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[Ilya Kazakevich]

Hello,

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Bill Tillman <btill...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> i386 will not see anything above 4 GB

Actually you *can* give access to >4Gb RAM for your system: PAE allows you
to use 36 bits instead of 32 to address your memory (and supported till
Pentium Pro) but that is only for OS (32bit apps would see 4Gb only).

Anyway, I have not seen any troubles with 64bit installations.

Ilya.

[Shane Ambler]

On 29/11/2012 22:00, Jakub Lach wrote:
> If it was from me, my system is without 32bit compat
> whatsoever, and this is not default setting on amd64.
>
> Maybe on def. amd64 there are no problems, I don't
> know, nobody replied to my thread.
>

I have been running 9.0 amd64 for nearly 12 months, I think it was about
february that I compiled my system with clang and no 32 bit libs. With
the default install there is a small catch that the lib32 folder still
gets created even though it is empty. Ports only check the existence of
the folder to try to build 32 bit libs and therefore fail. valgrind is
an example of that.
Simply deleting the lib32 folder solves that. (pr/165175)

I vaguely recall being surprised that one of the emulators was only
32bit (may be fixed by now) I haven't had any other issues since
deleting the lib32 folder.

[Jakub Lach]

The problem is, it gets recreated upon updating from source.



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[Jakub Lach]

Even that I was aware of that, I've just lost track of it. Thanks for simple
solution.





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[Thomas Mueller]

> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Bill Tillman <btill...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> > i386 will not see anything above 4 GB


> Actually you *can* give access to >4Gb RAM for your system: PAE allows you
> to use 36 bits instead of 32 to address your memory (and supported till
> Pentium Pro) but that is only for OS (32bit apps would see 4Gb only).

> Anyway, I have not seen any troubles with 64bit installations.

> Ilya.

How does the system know what is OS and what is 32-bit apps?

Where would GCC fit in this regard, or Clang for that matter?

Tom

[Ilya Kazakevich]

> How does the system know what is OS and what is 32-bit apps?
>

"OS" works in kernel space while application is not.

PAE affects paging system allowing software to address 2^36 bytes of memory.
You can access it in kernel space, but user space applications are limited
to 2^32 bytes of virtual memory (even less than 2^32 because of mappings).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

If you are interested in memory management in IA-32 (and IA-32e) here are
good links:
1) official guide:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures-software-developer-manuals.html
2) nice (human-readable) book:
http://mindshare.com/shop/?c=b&section=0A6B17101710

> Where would GCC fit in this regard, or Clang for that matter?
>

If you write app for user-space (not kernel module) you should not care
about PAE.
You simply compile it as you would do it for system with out of PAE.

Ilya.

[Andrea Venturoli]

On 11/30/12 15:40, Thomas Mueller wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Bill Tillman <btill...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>> i386 will not see anything above 4 GB
>
>
>> Actually you *can* give access to >4Gb RAM for your system: PAE allows you
>> to use 36 bits instead of 32 to address your memory (and supported till
>> Pentium Pro) but that is only for OS (32bit apps would see 4Gb only).
>
>> Anyway, I have not seen any troubles with 64bit installations.
>
>> Ilya.
>
> How does the system know what is OS and what is 32-bit apps?

I think this question is badly written.

A kernel supporting PAE can see and use more than 4GB.
However, since apps runs unmodified, a single process cannot break that
barrier.

So, if you are running a single program that requires that lot of
memory, PAE is not an option and you will need amd64.

OTOH, if you run several programs which don't singularly require more
than 3GB of RAM, PAE might be a viable alternative to reinstalling.

> Where would GCC fit in this regard, or Clang for that matter?

I don't really know, but I don't think it could make any difference.



bye
av.