Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 06:57:29 -0400 From: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> To: Indigo 23 <indigo23@gmail.com>, freebsd-ports@freebsd.org, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrading to amd64 requires recompilation of ports? Message-ID: <20070617105729.GA41789@rot13.obsecurity.org> In-Reply-To: <20070617100401.GA48338@slackbox.xs4all.nl> References: <6f50eac40706161521r2b524263la2385138f67e10bc@mail.gmail.com> <20070617100401.GA48338@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
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On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 12:04:01PM +0200, Roland Smith wrote: > On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 06:21:40PM -0400, Indigo 23 wrote: > > Does anyone think that its worth the hassle? If you do manage to get > > it up and running, will you see any noticeable advantages or is it > > better to just stick with i386? The only caveat that I can see is a > > recompilation of all the ports. Any thoughts? > > You don't really _need_ it unless you've got more than four gigs of RAM > and are routinely running out of memory on i386. Then again, I installed > amd64 instead of i386 because I could. :-) No regrets so far. s/'ve got more than four gigs of RAM and//. Regardless of amount of RAM, lack of virtual address space on i386 is crippling for certain uses, for example ZFS. > Some stuff like binary drivers, flash player, is not available on > amd64 (not necessarily a bad thing :-). I think i386 has more ports > available as packages. > > Amd 64 will use some more disk space and RAM. Certain CPU-intensive applications will be faster when compiled for amd64 (because of e.g. more registers being available). Other applications may be slower because of increased time required to copy 64-bit pointers compared to 32-bit. There are other architectural differences (e.g. 4 levels of page tables) that may also cause different performance characteristics, plus and minus. It all depends on your workload, so you have to test it and see. Krishome | help
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