LFS 64bit - thoughts

[Ken Moffat]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 09:44:51PM -0500, DJ Lucas wrote:
> I can't really add a lot here as I haven't tried it yet.  I think 
> pure-64 is ideal, but from what little I've looked into it, that is just 
> not possible.....yet, not to mention that it breaks the LSB goal.

 Maybe "not possible" for your particular use case.  I've been using
pure64 on one of my boxes for a long time. (No proprietary plugins -
I've long since dropped realplayer, flash either works with gnash
(usually, old flash) or it's no loss to me, and I don't need to access
other proprietary formats.)  On ppc64 I do stick with multilib, because
the box performs like a dog, and compiling 32-bit ppc is sometimes
less difficult than 64-bit (a mac G5 has to have a 64-bit kernel).

 Of course, my usage is fairly minimal (abiword, gnumeric, the gimp,
xcalc (!), gucharmap, evince [ see below ], plus some audio and
video (some video works, some doesn't).

 Ok, at the moment evince is a problem - since gcc-4.2 came out I
have the old "it crashes xorg" bug which with gcc-4.1.2 was fixed by
upgrading pixman, so far I haven't found a working combination with
the _old_ gnome versions I'm currently using.  But, kpdf and
kghostview (from 3.5) are a workaround.

 I don't have any wifi, but from what I can tell the libre drivers
are making great advances.  Similarly, I don't have any reason to
use non-libre graphics drivers (my only nvidia machine is the ppc64,
for which there aren't any drivers other than xorg and nouveau).

 Why do I use 64-bit on x86_64 ?

o More registers, it ought to help gcc produce better code. About
 3 or 4 years ago, I did some benchmarking on audio re-encoding and
 batch image manipulation - 64-bit userspace was faster.

o I think diversity in the environment is a good thing in itself.

o Because I can ;-)

ĸen
-- 
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce