ia32-libs [was: Bringing Wine into Main]

Scott James Remnant scott at canonical.com
Wed Dec 17 13:15:10 GMT 2008


On Wed, 2008-12-17 at 10:21 +0000, Przemek Kulczycki wrote:

> I'm wondering if we really need a full 64-bit OS and all applications at all.
> In [Open]Solaris, only the kernel and some apps are 64-bit, and the
> rest is still 32-bit because being 64-bit doesn't give them any
> advantage.
> I know it's out of scope of this discussion, but maybe instead of
> having a separate full 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu we could
> try a Solaris way and make a one hybrid 64-bit/32-bit os?
> 
The primary difference is that Solaris was written for the SPARC
processor, in which the 64-bit line is an evolution of the already
performant 32-bit line.

In the Intel world, there are some substantial differences between the
64-bit and 32-bit architectures.  One of the most notable is that the
64-bit architecture has many more registers available than the 32-bit
one.

This means there's often a performance bonus for even the smallest
application.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at canonical.com
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