Re: How to run Microsoft Internet Explorer on NetBSD?

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, 29 Jan 2016, Hal Murray wrote:
> The thing you get with 64 bits is pointers that work in more than 4 
> gigabytes of memory.

Yes, of course, but with PAE that shouldn't be a problem. Of course, it 
appears that PAE is still considered experimental in NetBSD, since it's 
not enabled by default.

> There are some problems where you need 64 bit integers.  You can get 
> those on a 32 bit system with long long.

If you are lucky... Without the new-school integer types in in stdint.h, 
those canonical declarations like "long" or even "long long" can be fuzzy.

> That may be a pain if you are trying to compile software that somebody 
> else wrote.

Agreed. That's why I wish things like uint16_t ,uint32_t, and uint64_t are 
so nice. However, I think they came with C99 or something like that. So, a 
lot of "legacy" code and code written by people who don't know about the 
new types (or don't care) still has older integer types. Programmers 
usually like determinism. I'm not sure why things went so far off the 
rails with integer sizes et al. Probably has to something to do with 
having so many compilers and CPU types in the 80's and 90's.

> I have amd64 7.0 running on a system with 4 GB but /proc/meminfo says 
> it's only using 3.  Is there anything I have to do to get it to use the 
> other GB?

I've noticed the same thing. I always just figured it was the kernel 
reserving buffers or something. I guess if you switched on the 
experimental PAE code, it you might see a lot more of your RAM. Scope out 
this blog:

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/pae_support_for_native_i386

I learned a thing or two when I read it just now and it speaks directly to 
this topic.

-Swift