Linked by Bas v.d. Wiel on Thu 18th Dec 2003 05:12 UTC
A couple of weeks ago TerraSoft released preliminary 64-bit ISO's of their flagship product, Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 (YDL), especially for owners of Apple's new G5 machines. I was pining for a chance to get an open source OS running in 64-bit mode so I quickly downloaded the three ISO's.
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What advantages would Linux have over OSX? Is OSX not tuned or compiled for 64-bit computing on the G5?
There are a lot of disadvantages to both at the present time.
OS X suffers from a lack of a 64-bit ABI and userland. This is most likely due to the incredible work which is required for Apple to modify their Cocoa development tools to support a secondary binary format, as the current Mach-O format dates back over a decade to NeXT. Consequently, applications can only address 4GB at a time (which can be somewhat disadvantageous if you're considering using the G5 for a scientific modelling program in which one process uses 8GB of RAM) and code which makes large usage of 64-bit integers does not see a performance boost.
The important thing to consider is that when Apple does define a new 64-bit ABI for MacOS X, they can address a number of problems limiting the performance of the current ABI. Consequently, when the 64-bit rollout occurs on OS X, it should result in an overall system performance increase of 10%-20% from the new ABI alone.
The biggest drawback of 64-bit Linux on the G5 right now is, in my opinion, the software controlled fans. The G5 is a marvelously silent machine... when running OS X. However, with no software regulating the fans, they default to their maximum speed, transforming the G5 from quiet elegance to a noisy monster. This may or may not be a problem for everyone, but it's certain to wear out the fans faster.