On Fri, 1 Apr 2016, Benny Siegert wrote:
This may not be the point, but: If you have that much RAM, why do you use a 32-bit kernel in the first place?I just took the GENERIC kernel, modified one line to enable PAE and then rebooted my i7 with 24G of RAM. I'm using NetBSD 7.0 i386.
I know what you mean, but I have one lame-but-valid reason: wine. It doesn't work on NetBSD AMD64 but rather it works only on i386. I hate this fact, but I use it a lot. There are several little windows programs that do specialized things that are pretty "must have" for me on this specific system (I'm not willing to justify or rationalize to others why I need this - just understand it's must-have in my use-case). Running them over VNC or something like that isn't an option for these specific apps. They need to run on my machine at near-native speed locally.
That reminds me, I wish there was something like a "SunPC" card for a regular old PC. That way I could run Windows or some other heinous crap natively on the little PCIe card, while leaving my "real" OS untouched. Anyone ever hear of such a thing? I've seen little transputers but nothing you can pass through a VGA display from ala the SunPC card for Solaris.
In benchmarks for Go, the devs found that 64-bit code gives a 10-15% speedup across the board. This is because there are more processor registers in 64-bit mode, so more variables can be kept in registers.
I don't doubt it a bit. I normally run AMD64 on most machines, but I have the one that needs to run Wine and when it only sees 2GB of RAM the box will swap even just compiling stuff in pkgsrc. I'm using an SSD and I don't want it to swap (write cycles). So, I want the extra RAM to work so I don't run into swapping issues.
-Swift