Re: new software if moving to amd64?

[Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com>]

On 5 October 2014 16:21, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

I see no reason for it to fuse given multiarch works now.  I expect
people to have amd64/x32 multiarch systems though since the majority
of programs don't need a 64bit memory space so you would gain smaller
binaries and less cache usage due to the smaller pointers.  The kernel
would obviously be 64bit.  For those few programs that have a use for
64bit memory space, yo would use amd64 packages.

Essentially I think it makes sense to run 64bit kernel, with x32 as the
default and amd64 for select applications, and perhaps i386 for the few
things that can't be bothered to upgrade away from old 32bit.

I would observe that AIX took a similar path to this; the typical application
that doesn't need a large memory space operates in 32 bit mode, but

specific apps would be compiled with 64 bit options.

The set of applications that need to be "64 bit capable" tends to grow,

alas.  It gets quite annoying if cat/awk/sed/tail/sort/tar "blow up" upon
receiving large inputs, particularly if you've got plenty of RAM to cope with

the data.  Things may work out fine given APIs that can cope with
large files (there was an API designed for that, of course!), but I'll bet
there will be surprising cases.

--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"