Re: amd64 or i386?

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 08:21:49 +1100
Carl Brewer <carl%bl.echidna.id.au@localhost> wrote:

> 
> I'm about to replace some aging hardware (2.8g celeron) with new
> stuff, Intel C2D E7400 with a swag of RAM etc.  The new motherboard
> has an ethernet chip not supported in 4.0.1 (realtek 8168B/8111B Rev
> 0.02) so I'm going to have to go to 5.0RC2 I guess or fiddle with
> unreleased kernels.  Anyway ... The gist of the question :
> 
> As I'll be pulling a number of apps over, including a cyrus
> mailserver, plone & zope, sendmail with some milters (clamav &
> spamassassin) and a few other bits & pieces including apache 2.2 and
> squirrelmail, should I go to an amd64 architecture or stick with
> i386?  This is by no means a criticism, but with OpenSolaris i386
> stuff seems to 'just work' on 64 bit systems as far as I can tell, is
> this the case also with NetBSD 5.0 amd64 and i386 stuff (mainly from
> pkgsrc).
> 
> I guess the meat of it is, I expect to run this box as it is for 2-3 
> years, is it worth going to amd64 or should I stick with i386 for
> ease of the move?
> 
> Any suggestions much appreciated!
> 
My experience with amd64 -- I've been running my laptop that way for
about 15 months -- is that most pkgsrc apps just work, but a few
break.  It's generally not too hard to find the problem, if you dig --
usually though always, it's been an issue of function parameters not
being declared as 'long' -- but don't be surprised if something breaks.

You might want to post a list and see who here has experience with
those apps.  Of the ones you've listed, I've run exactly none of them
on amd64...


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb