[linux-audio-user] AMD64 with Linux audio applications?

[Mario Lang]

jjbenham at chicagoguitar.com (Jeremiah Benham) writes:

> On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 12:36:48AM +0100, Mario Lang wrote:
>> Not really.  You usually solve this issue by either creating a 64-bit
>> chroot in a 32-bit base system or a 32-bit chroot in a 64-bit base
>> system.  These chroots can be very useful since some apps just don't
>> work in 64-bit mode yet.  We are using this method at work to make
>> 32-bit commercial apps run on our 64-bit x84_64 machines, and it
>> works very well.  I wouldn't call it confusing.  Its actually very logical
>> as soon as you start to grasp the chroot concept.
>
> How do most of these audio applications behave in 64bit mode? If you
> have applications that are running in a 32bit chroot can they
> communicate with other applications in 64bit mode?

Depends on how they want to communicate.  Direct jack connects dont
work, so you can't run a 64-bit jack and connect a 32-bit jack app
to it.  But OSC for instance works nice.  I.e. I can run
SuperCollider  the synth server in 64-bit mode, connect it to
64-bit jack, and run SuperCollider the language client in 32-bit
mode and make scsynth and sclang talk to each other via OSC.

> I also wonder about price/performance ratio and ease of administration.
> Ignoring the fact that it make take a little extra work to get
> everything to run smoothly do you find that the performace is worth the
> price of x86-64 compared to say athlon xp?

Our Dual-Opteron machine is soo damn fast I couldnt believe
it at first.  We're having internal jokes that AMD is a problem
for sysadmins, since one doesn't even find the time to get a coffee
anymore :-)..  OTOH, I am probably biased since I only worked with
Opteron so far which as I understand it performs quite a bit better
than its smaller brothers...

-- 
CYa,
  Mario