On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 12:13:20AM -0800, Tyrion wrote:
My cpu is listed as
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor TK-55
in /proc/cpuinfo. I have Ubuntu gutsy installed, but just the standard
x86 version. I have downloaded the 64 bit version and burned a CD but
before I get into the whole reinstall, I wonder if someone could tell me
if it's worth it. Also, would I need to do a full reinstall, or would
changing the kernel be sufficient?
I setup my first 64-bit machine a few years ago. It was quite a pain back
then. I ended up creating an entire 32-bit chroot of a full linux install,
just so that the handful of things that were broken.
These days, there doesn't seem to be any problems with this stuff.
At this point, I'm considering moving my last machine off of 32-bit, just
for consistency. It's going to depend a lot on your distribution as far as
support, but it should support running legacy programs just fine. You
might check with others who are running the same distribution you will be
running just to make sure.
You will need to do a full install. It is basically a completely different
architecture, that happens to also be able to run x86 32-bit code as well.
You could upgrade only the kernel, but then you'd still have a 32-bit
userspace.
I'm gradually finding things that take advantage of having 64-bit
addresses, and these things work better than on a 32-bit platform (being
able to mmap files of arbitrary size is one example).
David
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
