On Monday 22 January 2007 17:05, Matt wrote:
What are advantages of 64 bit OS anyway? I was thinking with i386 the max RAM you could have was like 4 gigabyte or something? 64 bit allows quite a bit more, right?
You can have alot of RAM even in a 32-bit system. However, there is also the issue of efficiency and applications being able to actually use alot of memory. Here are some random bits of information on the subject:
* you can have alot more than 4G on 32-bit with pae (hugemem kernels) * ...but, already at ~900M 32-bit has to start using highmem * ...which can cause problems for (old and badly designed) applications already at ~900M * 32-bit EL kernels have 4K kernel stacks, 64-bit has 8K, affects eg. XFS
I am upgrading a very heavilly used email server to a AMD64 dual core with CentOS. I am staying with i386 since the web GUI we use lists 64bit support as beta and I do not want any problems.
Not a bad choice, software functionality is probably one of the biggest differences between 32- and 64-bit.
/Peter