On Wednesday 12 December 2007 02:07:17 pm Michael L Torrie wrote: > Joshua Draper wrote: > > If the only reason you need 64-bit is to access all your memory, > > you can do that with a 32-bit linux distribution. You just need to > > recompile the kernel with the appropriate value in CONFIG_HIGHMEM.
According to Linus' recent post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, you should use a 64-bit version rather than support for 64GB of RAM: > Compiling your own > kernel is *not* the answer in a production environment, especially > servers. It's just too expensive a process. Compiling a kernel is a great idea, IMO. It could give you a great performance increase if done right. However, doing it right is not very easy. First, distro's default configuration include almost every driver in the book (hence the "expensive process"). I've seen SuSE kernels take hours to compile on decent hardware because they compile every possible driver the machine can use. One trick to compiling your kernel in a production environment is to set a low priority on the build. Doing a "nice -n 10 make" on any build will make sure it only uses spare processor time to compile, reducing the impact on other processes. > In general, though, here's just no reason to run 32-bit anymore on a > 64-bit platform, especially a server. I will qualify this statement (even though it is not mine). 64-bit is great for large systems, but not so great for smaller systems. You can Google for benchmarks testing both 32-bit and 64-bit distributions on the same hardware and 32-bit usually runs faster. If you have a desktop (anything with less than 4 GB of RAM) and have no need for 64-bit stuff, use 32-bit. Using 64-bit just because it is the latest thing is not the best way to go. That would dictate I switch to Vista simply because it is the latest thing. For your application, however, go 64-bit all the way. However, you may be able to install a new version of Fedora and downgrade to Python 2.4 for compatibility. -- Alberto Treviño [EMAIL PROTECTED] Testing Center Brigham Young University -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
