On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 12:58, John Chronakis wrote: > And here are my questions: > * How does debian amd64 compares with other distros (suse, fedora) in > terms of stability and 64 bit efficiency? Usually gentoo guys would disclaim that gentoo is way faster than debian because of all their fine-tuned compile options specifically tailored to the system they're building on. Well, this might be true for i386, but it surely isn't for amd64 - simply because all the debian pure64 packages are built using the amd64 optimizations: there is no speed-vs-backwards-compatibility tradeoff here. As for stability, debian pure64 is mainly based on debian sid/unstable. It runs fine for me, but I probably wouldn't want to run it on production critical systems. But actually I doubt that's different with the other distributions - amd64 just isn't tested as well as i386 is for obvious reasons ;) > * What is the difference between pure64 and gcc-3.4? I saw somewhere > that gcc-3.4 binaries run faster. Is there a catch? I haven't tried the gcc-3.4 archive myself, but rumor has it that it is faster - gcc-3.4 making more aggressive optimizations using the new registers the amd64 introduced. The catch being that the official debian ports are running with gcc-3.3. So the gcc-3.4 branch is an amd64 specific one. It is planned to continue that branch, but there's no estimation as to when all those branches will finally converge... > * The mailing list left me with the impression that sarge is not ready > yet, is it?. Does it keep up with the i386 sarge? Can it be installed > like an i386 sarge (net inst->base system->package installation)? Well, official sarge is going to be released "soon". amd64 sarge is actually a symlink to sid, afaik (correct me if I'm wrong). As for installation, there are debian installer CD images available for amd64. Generic, i.e. i386, netinstall images wouldn't work. -- Sebastian Steinlechner
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