Submitted by As computer technology moves forward, you’ll already have the established base and experience working with FreeBSD 64-bit. It’s not about higher performance except in compiling software, high-end graphics rendering, and math-intensive work such as compressing files or in complex cryptology applications. It’s about future-proofing.
Desktop FreeBSD: 64-bit Future
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I work daily with 32-bit FreeBSD 6.x series, and it’s great. It’s rock-solid. I need to test the 64-bit version to see how it performs, specially, how many ports in the ports collection are 64-bit ready.
What was mentioned in the article, assuming you’ve read it is that of 15000 ports, only 500 are 32bit only. Meaning 14500 are for 64-bit.
I haven’t been using BSD64, but XP64, and I’m amazed by how certain things are extremely different.
Everything which is very computing intense seem to gain alot from being in the 64bit world (assuming you got the right HW for the job). Like for instance, unraring files or raring files is done with almost twice the speed. things you don’t do every day perhaps, but you do notice how it is faster.
I believe in any app you will note the difference of throughput, and the overall feeling of the system. But don’t forget, RAM is still expensive, and you need a lot more RAM to push your box to the limit.
For some of us, who has the need of RAM no matter if we go 32bit or 64 bit, I’d recommend jumping on the 64bit train and enjoy that extra speed.
P.s I do realize there might be difficulties with certain drivers, but so far it’s not as bad as one would expect D.s
What’s the killer app that will push the majority of people to the 64bit OS platform? I don’t see one right now. Nice though that software developers (and many hardware) are preparing.
There are only a few types of applications that really take advantage of being 64bit. One example are your 3D apps like Maya,Lightwave, and XSI. I saw a review of a 64bit version of Lightwave. The decrease in time for rendering in 64bit compared to 32 bit was quite large.
Its really only a matter of time before we start seeing more 64bit applications but its still a matter of drivers , and some apps not working in 64bit such as flash. I believe you still need some hack or workaround to get flash to work properly in 64bit firefox.
I’ve tried OpenBSD and FreeBSD@amd64, both worked well. I’m waiting for nvidia’s driver for FreeBSD that works on amd64.
I work as a software engineer for a manufacturing company and in our group we develop machine vision software. We have recently made the switch to 64-bit machines and specifically AMD to run our vision applications for several reasons:
1. Machine vision algorithms are extremely compute-intensive and can take advantage of all those extra registers.
2. The images we process with are 12k x 96k pixels, that’s over a gig, just sitting in RAM. So we needed to be able to have LOTS of RAM.
3. The AMD64 architechture has an incredible memory bandwidth, which we are every bit as much memory-bound as we are CPU-bound.
4. Many of our algorithms involve expensive linear algebra operations and FFTs and AMD gives away their Core Math Library (ACML), while Intel makes you pay expensive licensing fees for their MKL.
We have already seen a several fold improvement over similarly equipped 32-bit workstations and even 64-bit running Win32 instead of Win64.
On a side note: How well does the FreeBSD linux compatibility layer handle using 32-bit linux libraries on 64-bit FreeBSD?
We have already seen a several fold improvement over similarly equipped 32-bit workstations and even 64-bit running Win32 instead of Win64.
The several-fold improvement has been seen over both cases given. Obviously since 64bit machines running Win32 might as well just be 32-bit systems.
Read this and weep:
http://www.worlds-fastest.com/2os.pdf
Solaris on SPARC has been 64bit for a long while now, but you still find loads of 32 bit binaries on there, sometimes 64 bit binaries and 64 bit libraries = slower running.
Beware!
Now, in AMD64 mode you get 16 registers instead of the normal 8, and some other enhancements that, with a lot of recoding of various applications that could benefit along with a recompile, could net some increase.
PAE/36 bit memory addressing on IA32 pretty much can extend IA32 for a few more years. If you have more than 4GB of memory you might have an arguments for 64 bit. But in reality, you would need more than 32GB/64GB of memory to really complain about IA32 at this point.
I’m waiting a LONG time to convert over to AMD64/x86_64, no need, no speed, pain in the ass.
From this doc:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp3982.pdf
Also, on Windows x64, they disabled the following:
– Microsoft DOS (why get rid of being able to legacy dos programs, WHY?)
– 16-bit applications (breaks installers, a lot of 16 bit installers are still being used believe it or not)
– OS/2 subsystem (dumb, breaks IBM disk imaging programs and some other old assorted stuff)
– Portable Operating System for UNIX (POSIX) (FUN break Interix! )
– A number of older transport protocols, such as AppleTalk and NETBEUI (why? why burden the user? What if they want this brain dead stuff? why would msft make windows 2003 R2 32 bit work with this and not x64? why make the two products different?)
WOW64 makes 32 bit windows programs slower. 99.9% of all software is 32 bit/win32.
Have fun now with %SYSTEMROOT%system32 and WindowsSysWOW64 .
that’s right, 64 bit binaries in system32, and 32 bit binaries in SysWOW64. Dumb as crap.
more info here:
http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid68_gci1204…
If you havent bought a Sun or some other heavy iron for 64bit by now you don’t need it, and it will slow you down and screw things up from binary plugins for browsers in linux to Windows being a complete dog-crap mess.
64 bit should not be taken lightly, it has performance implications and frankly the only vendor who I have seen do a great job migrating (Including linuxen and Windows) is Sun.
“PAE/36 bit memory addressing on IA32 pretty much can extend IA32 for a few more years. If you have more than 4GB of memory you might have an arguments for 64 bit. But in reality, you would need more than 32GB/64GB of memory to really complain about IA32 at this point. ”
PAE is a hack job and it will always be a hack job. There are serious limitations to how large single processes can go using PAE. Also, there are serious bugs/hacks when using PAE. PAE is not a solution. It was Intel’s me too hack that allowed people to sell 32-bit Windows system when the customer really needed a 64-bit Unix box.
I said in my post:
“If you havent bought a Sun or some other heavy iron for 64bit by now you don’t need it”
Clients right now have no real reason to be 64 bit, and despite PAE being a “dirty hack,” I’ve used it in past to break the 4GB barrier without much fanfare. Better than not having more than 4GB. If you really need more than 4GB per process, then as I implied before, buy real iron for the job.