Oliver Schinagl wrote: > not to start a flamewar or the like, but linux can run 32bit bins, just not > nativly afaik, you need some sort of emu library. But since I use gentoo, and > pretty much everything is compiled from source anyway, I only have stupid > closed src bins that would need to work in 32bit mode to begin with. So to > me, that wouldn't really be an issue :)
Actually, the x86_64 linux kernel will run 32bit applications natively. The X86_64 instruction set changes in 64bit mode which cause problems are all in the privileged instruction set and this is purely a kernel domain. What the kernel has to cope with, however, are the different data sizes. As with Solaris, Linux running 32bit apps with a 64bit kernel needs to have the 32bit libraries so that the programs can interface with the kernel correctly. It's just the same. The problem is that there a number of religious zealots in the Linux world who would have you believe that a 64bit operating system is only ideologically pure if all the apps are 64bit as well and hence don't supply 32bit libraries. For the most part, 32bit binaries will run faster (my benchmarks on both Linux and Solaris generally get a x2 speed improvement) than their 64bit counterparts, probably due to the extra memory bandwidth and cache space they need, on the same system and kernel. Only a very few programs need to access more than 3GB of memory. This is why, by default, applications on Solaris are built as 32bit binaries even on 64bit hardware. It also makes the binaries more portable. Anyway, this is getting way off the topic of ZFS. Solaris makes an excellent NFS/CIFS server (with Samba for the CIFS part). ZFS itself is excellent, in my experience, as long as you don't want fine-grained control over user space usage. As I've just discovered, the current work-around for this is to use the underlying, excellent, zpool technology to manage the storage itself and overlay another filesystem in a zvol for those circumstances where ZFS isn't there yet. I hope that helps. Steve -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Systems Administrator, E-Mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Earth Sciences, Tel:- +44 (0)1865 282110 University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, UK. Fax:- +44 (0)1865 272072 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
