Has anyone got any experience with the Debian AMD-64 project? Basically I'm wondering if it's worth trying to install, or just stick with 32 bit for now.

Will a 64 bit kernel work with a 32 bit distribution?

Thanks

Rob

Thanks, I'll give Fedora a try.

Rob

I think the intent is that 64-bit kernels should normally be able to run any mix of 64/32 bit apps. But appropriate libraries are required for this to work.

Cheers

Gentoo for amd64 is running fine at home...

... and as they said, you can compile a program to 32bit libraries, ie. firefox so flash/java works.

/Fredrik

64-bit applications cannot use 32-bit libraries, so you'd need
to install a 32-bit version of Firefox/Mozilla in order to use
binary-only plugins.

Somehow I feel reluctant to do this.

Pim

Is 64-bit Linux useful for anything besides greater address space and its related benefits? If not, I can't see any disadvantage to having your browser be 32-bit. Heck, on Solaris, which has had 64-bit processors for years, almost everything is compiled 32-bit because there's just no need for the 64-bit address space, and there's a minor performance hit for running 64-bit binaries.

mp3 encoders run faster as 64-bit apps.

Nowadays, 32-bits is no longer enough for a large address space, and more efficient paging mechanisms are facilitated by 64-bit addressing modes.

If all one is doing is running MS s/w, then don't bother. But for Linux, 64-bit sings!

Cheers

Right. But I can't imagine that a browser, or any realistic browser plugin, would really benefit from 64-bit addressing. If you're using that much memory with your web browser, maybe you should start closing those windows for every page you visited over the last two years.

It's not that I require my browser to be a native 64-bit application. It's just the fact that the browser that comes with the system is, and that I would need to install a 32-bit one manually.

And then I would need to install every library it needs, and use 32-bit plugins for everything. It would end in having two operating systems running in parallel, just because noone at Macromedia cares to type "make".

At least Sun is promising to deliver a 64-bit plugin (64-bit java is already there) as soon as Mozilla publish a reference 64-bit build of their browsers. Currently, there is none, as it is the distro companies that are doing the ports.

Pim

Yes.. I just recently installed the latest hd-install image on my dual opteron box.. install went flawlessly.

After installing, I pointed sources.list at:
deb http://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/gcc-3.4 sarge main contrib non-free

did a dist-upgrade, and installed all the software I wanted. It's been up for a week with no issues. I had to downgrade my kernel to 2.6.7 because of a minor bug in the USB code that crept into 2.6.8 that causes my USB2 external box to not work properly (fixed in 2.6.10pre, but i'm too lazy to compile that stuff) as soon as I'm done with the burner, i'm going back to 2.6.9.

I installed the system off a 512mb USB thumb drive, I can send you all the info on how I did it if you want.

If you use the gcc-3.4 compiler, there are a bunch of optimizations that go into the 64bit code, so it is very fast. I don't have any benchmark comparisions, but after installing Debian/amd64+gcc3.4 on my dual 2.0 opteron, it just feels f aster than the i386 version.