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From: Damjan on 23 Apr 2008 18:53
First, a full 64bit distibution has it's shortcommings too. Ted Tso gives a
nice overview of the details here:
http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux-thinkpad/2008-February/042289.html

One of the sollutions I like is the Debian one.
The 32bit Debian release also has in the repositories a 64bit kernel and a
64bit libc. Its gcc also supports building either 64bit or 32bit binaries.

Thus you get the benefits of the 64bit kernel, where it's most important
anyway, you can custom compile certain programs as 64bit but the majority
of programs are 32bit - thus not allocating so much memory.


ps.
I did not read the part about XEN, but I'd suggest you look at KVM, much
simpler much better in any way. And it's fast becoming THE virtuelization
support for Linux.

--
damjan
From: lukaswu on 24 Apr 2008 15:39
>
> I know this question has been dealt with in the past, I've read a lot
> of threads about Slackware supporting an official 64-bit release in
> the future or not. Many discussions are becoming old though, we're
> April 2008 now, and almost all new hardware is 64-bit, and 64-bit
> OS'es are becoming more and more mainstream.

Yeap, I am runnig big production server farm yet we still use mostly
32-bit enterpise OSes. Reason? The only one is if you need more than 4GB
addressed in the continues way(I am running servers with 64GB memory on
2.4 kernel). So this fact touches pretty large DB
installations and some fancy middleware. The latest buzzing virtualization
implicates this for another reason since some solutions have sort of
bubbling addressing but Xen in 4.x releases comes only as a 64-bit env.
Apart for XEN do you really have to use 64-bit?

Typical scenario is that after installing pure 64-bit server I have to add
lots of compat libraries because tools, installators etc etc which come
with the commercial software are still 32-bit, which often doubles
libraries needed. So I still treat x86-64 Linux servers as immature
solution which is on the crossroad.


As for Slackware it has always been rather educational and for small
servers, so I guess PV has not seen yet the reason for supporting 64-bit.


--
luk





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