24 Jun
2009
24 Jun
'09
4:11 p.m.
On Wed, 17 Jun 2009, Mark Knecht wrote:
WRT to the original audio distribution proposal I want
to throw out an
idea that Linus and some of the other high-end kernel developers have
been discussing on the LKML, and it rings true as possibly important
for folks like us doing audio work. The comment was that distribution
packagers haven't accepted the idea of providing a 64-bit kernel with
a 32-bit tool set. The idea, as I understand it, is that with a 64-bit
kernel you get the potential advantages of using all the features of
your newer 64-bit processor - newer hardware flags, more memory. On
the other hand 32-bit apps might work better in virtualized
environments and, in my experience, would provide more backward
compatibility with older audio and Windows stuff. Linus and others
seem to think it's a a good thing to do, but no one is doing it yet.
I'm not qualified to say what's good or bad about it.
Well, that's not a setup I'd want for myself (though I do see the
advantages you're mentioning), but for people who want to do that, it's
probably not something that the distro needs to specifically package.
There's nothing at all really stopping you from putting a 64-bit kernel
on your 32-bit install, and actually at work, I have even done that on
some of the nodes of one of our research computational clusters, where
almost everything is 32-bit, but we still want the extra memory. You
just drop your kernel on.
The only package I've seen that seems to absolutely hate that setup is
iptables, since it comes with userland commands that integrate very
tightly with what's in the kernel, and it doesn't seem to work to have
the binaries be 32-bit and the kernel be 64. You'd probably have to get
a 64-bit iptables package to make that work.
--
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+ UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
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+ James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky