On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Alicia da Conceicao wrote:
> What of the many NetBSD hardware ports provide true 64 bit
> support?  (This means 64 bit pointers, 64 bit long ints!)

IIRC alpha and sparc64 are the LP64 systems these days that are supported
by NetBSD. 


> And of these NetBSD ports, which would be considered stable
> enough for use in banking applications? 

Alpha should definitely do. Sparc64 is a very fresh port, and some work
may be needed to make it 100% fit your needs.


> Currently we are
> running banking software on NetBSD/i386 hardware, but we
> wish to migrate to 64 bit systems due to many limitations
> with large (> 20GB) databases & memory-maps) on 32 bit
> systems.  The 64 bit hardware will be used as servers, with
> no X, audio, mouse, etc.; it will only run ipfilter, ssh,
> progresql, sendmail, and our own banking daemons.

This sounds very interresting - would you want write up what you're doing
so we could put it on our Testimonials
(http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/testimonial.html) or "Sites running
NetBSD" (http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/sites.html) web page?

I'd like to add one general note: Due to the fact that LP64 systems aren't
very widespread and most development is done on little-endian, LP32
systems , you may face additional challenges on any LP64 platform,
regarless of the kind and operating system run. That's not to scare you
away, just to make sure you know of possible problems. 


> But Linux/macppc is only 32 bit, even though the macppc's
> have 64 bit processors.  Which is why we need to make
> sure we choose the right 64 bit hardware for NetBSD.

I cannot comment on these, but I note that there also 64bit MIPS
systems out there. One of the is being developed with NetBSD as one of the
primary target platforms, see http://www.sibyte.com.


 - Hubert

-- 
Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>