AMD64 Surpasses i386 As Debian's Most Popular Architecture 216
An anonymous reader writes with a quick note about the changing tides of computer architecture. From the article: "Bill Allombert announced [yesterday] via the Debian-devel mailing list that the X86_64 version of Debian has now surpassed all of the other supported architectures by a narrow margin. The most surprising part of this announcement however, and accompanying info-graphics provided on the Debian Popularity Contest page, is that this was not already true."
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
You should check up on PAE kernels [wikimedia.org].
Microsoft's flawed implementation (or lack of implementation) of PAE modes means that 32bit Windows can access and manage only 4GB of address space in total, even on a 64bit processor. Linux, BSD, and others implemented PAE correctly, and 32bit Linux can access and manage 64GB of RAM on a 64bit machine. Since it is rare for a single process to require more than 4GB of its own address space, there is not much reason to migrate from i386 to amd64 on Linux. On 32bit Windows, however, the total address space of all processes including the base OS and hardware I/O space cannot exceed 4GB. Hence the rapid shift from 32bit to 64bit in Windows, but the much more leisurely migration on Linux and BSD.
PAE has worked fine on Windows Server (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft's flawed implementation (or lack of implementation) of PAE modes
PAE has worked fine on Windows Server [microsoft.com]. Microsoft just disables PAE on 32-bit client operating systems because developers of drivers for desktop PC peripherals have been even slower to make their drivers PAE-clean.
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Informative)
And Debian, no less. You don't pick Debian for 'new hotness'.
Ubuntu has less amd64 installs than i386: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com]
sudo dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest and "Yes" to join the contest (mine was disabled for some reason).
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
Was some AMD fanboy trying to make a point or did someone post this pre-coffee?
Debian gave moniker "AMD64" to the Intel/x64 systems to honor the facts that (1) AMD had introduce it and (2) without AMD we would never had the affordable 64-bit systems. (Intel's version of the 64-bit future was the IA-64. [wikipedia.org])
Similar sentiment btw was shared by Linux kernel folks, but they decided (== Linus decided) in the end to use vendor-neutral 'x86-64' moniker.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
It's really just that naming is a mess.
The 32-bit architecture is known, variously, as "x86", "x86-32", "x32", "i386", "i686", or "IA-32".
The 64-bit architecture is known, variously, as "x64", "x86-64", "Intel 64", "IA-32e" ("IA-64" was taken by Itanium), "AMD64", "EM64T", and I think VIA has their own name for it.
Intel, obviously, uses the term "Intel 64" in marketing, "IA-32e" in technical writing. AMD obviously uses "AMD64", but as they were the first, many open-source projects were started under that name, and the term remains in use for historical purposes. Proprietary software tends to use the vendor-neutral "x64", while technical literature tends to use the more precise "x86-64" (as it is, after all, not the only 64-bit architecture around).
Re:size lies (Score:5, Informative)
Stop spreading FUD. 64 bit executables have smaller code. The larger executable size is due not to the increase in code size but to the unwind tables. On i386 executables are typically compiled with the frame pointer model, where functions store the current frame address (the start point for local variables) on the stack. On x86_64 the normal method is to let the compiler figure out where the local variables are based on the stack pointer. This way there is at least one memory access removed.
Omitting frame pointers incurs the cost of emitting a table of function information to allow C++ exceptions to walk back up the stack. This information is stored in the .ehframe section of the executable and only needs to be loaded when the application throws an exception. This section is not part of the working set. It is also not used by pure C programs. So, although the executable size is larger on x86_64, the extra space it is consuming is on the disk, not your CPU cache.
Yes, you always benefit from building everything for x86_64 if your OS is x86_64. And unless you are running some application where benchmarks definitively show a performance decrease in the 64 bit version, there is no reason whatsoever to run 32 bit any more. Drivers are no longer a problem. So stop spreading FUD!