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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20070122/4c2449d5/attachment-0005.sig>