On 5 October 2014 16:21, Lennart Sorensen <lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> I see no reason for it to fuse given multiarch works now. I expect > people to have amd64/x32 multiarch systems though since the majority > of programs don't need a 64bit memory space so you would gain smaller > binaries and less cache usage due to the smaller pointers. The kernel > would obviously be 64bit. For those few programs that have a use for > 64bit memory space, yo would use amd64 packages. > > Essentially I think it makes sense to run 64bit kernel, with x32 as the > default and amd64 for select applications, and perhaps i386 for the few > things that can't be bothered to upgrade away from old 32bit. > I would observe that AIX took a similar path to this; the typical application that doesn't need a large memory space operates in 32 bit mode, but specific apps would be compiled with 64 bit options. The set of applications that need to be "64 bit capable" tends to grow, alas. It gets quite annoying if cat/awk/sed/tail/sort/tar "blow up" upon receiving large inputs, particularly if you've got plenty of RAM to cope with the data. Things may work out fine given APIs that can cope with large files (there was an API designed for that, of course!), but I'll bet there will be surprising cases. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
