Re: [tlug] Only 32bits for Linux on UltraSparc II :(

[Ulrich Plate <plate@example.com>]

Zuco Pietro wrote:

> I tried some Linux distributions, and almost all the packages are
> compiled in 32bits, even Gentoo too.

All those distributions that actually bother supporting the Sparc
architecture to begin with keep their userland in 32-bit, even to hop
along sparc64 kernels. There's an experimental set of ebuilds for
Gentoo[1] that enables full 64-bit compilation which you can try out
if you find that sort of thing amusing, but there really isn't much of
a point to this exercise. When you run 64-bit programs, all they do is
double the size of the registers, but - unlike AMD64 for example -
their number stays the same. The only type of applications where that
might make a difference are large databases or other mathematically
fiendishly complex operations, but it's really only gobbling up twice
the memory, without much of a speed-up. That overhead kills whatever
benefit you'd expect from this, or so I'm told. If you want 64-bit
userland, I suggest you try Solaris... :P

Cheers
Ulrich Plate
[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32487

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