Re: Advantages of 64-bit vs 32-bit on old hardware

[Greg Earle <earle%isolar.DynDNS.ORG@localhost>]

raymond.meyer%rambler.ru@localhost wrote:
> Do most people run NetBSD sparc64 on their UltraSparc hardware, or are 
> there
> people like me, who prefer NetBSD sparc (32-bit sun4u kernel + 32-bit
> userland)?


I run Solaris 9 on my Dual 450 MHz Ultra 60.  I need something that works.
(And matches my work machines)


> I use Ultra 10 as my main desktop system. It can't take more than 1GB 
> or RAM,
> so I don't see much point in having 64-bit operating system. Are there 
> any
> particular advantages of a 64-bit kernel on such old hardware?


I think a better question is, "Are there any particular advantages of
such old hardware?"

You can find a (single CPU) 450 MHz Ultra 60 with 1 GB of RAM, a CD-ROM
drive and a 9 GB disk on eBay for US $95.  I cannot fathom for the life
of me why anyone in their right mind would run anything older/slower,
except out of pure masochism.


> Also, a lot of software in pkgsrc is not 64-bit clean.  I used to run 
> Solaris
> with 32-bit userland, compat_netbsd32 on sparc64 has problems.  But 
> now that
> NetBSD sparc port builds sunffb driver for X11 and '-mcpu=ultrasparc'
> compilation errors have been fixed, running NetBSD sparc port on 
> UltraSparc
> hardware seems like a better alternative than sparc64.


At one point on my Solaris 9 systems at work, I changed my default
compilation setup to only build things as 64-bit binaries, as by
then we'd gotten rid of all our old machines and the very oldest
machines we had were some 333 MHz Ultra 5+'s.  Things started
breaking left and right.  Maybe things have gotten better in this
regard over the last few years but at the time it was obvious that
a lot of ported software had never been built/run on pure 64-bit
systems and they broke.  I gave up and went back to building only
SPARC V8+ binaries and my life has been a lot smoother ever since.

   - Greg