pros and cons of AMD64 and i386 Linux on a home system
The situation is this I require to be able to run wine on my systems here (Debian AMD64)and I am finding this something of a pain with the current Debian. The version of wine required is 1.6. To install the develpment enviroment for wine ineffect requires an almost complete parrellel install of a 32 bit system. It seems to me it would be easier simply to install i386 and avoid the pain. There it appears only to be a minor issue in that the maximum memory for a single process would 4 gig and I have yet to see any program even gimp editing full size images from my Nikon D700 come even close to that figure. I have checked on the net for benchmarks between i386 and AMD64 and there is no obvious overall install that is faster. It would seem that the simplest path would be to install Debian 7 i386, this would allow the latest wine to be installed without any problems and I cannot myself see any down side. The system would still have access to the all the memory the only limitation being the 4gig process limit. There may be an issue with the speed of memory access on some of the latter video cards with large amounts of memory availible as this memory will need to be bank switched. This does not appear to be a problem at this stage. Hmmmmmmmmmmm, I have two main systems both efectively identical I will install i386 on one of these this will allow wine to be installled easily and the other one can be used to allow a comparison to be done between the two versions (i386 and AMD64) using 3D intensive software (a terrain simulation) to see what if any differences exist. I do have Debian i386 readily availible. Any comments would be apreciated! Lindsay
zlinw@mcmedia.com.au writes:
The situation is this I require to be able to run wine on my systems here (Debian AMD64) and I am finding this something of a pain with the current Debian. The version of wine required is 1.6. To install the develpment enviroment for wine ineffect requires an almost complete parrellel install of a 32 bit system.
So? A system overspecced enough to run wine will surely have a spare 2GB of nonvolatile storage for all the IA32 libraries.
It seems to me it would be easier simply to install i386 and avoid the pain.
IMO that depends on if this box is expected to do much else, besides wine. In any case, multiarch in Debian 7 should not be painful; if there is a problem, file a bug report.
There it appears only to be a minor issue in that the maximum memory for a single process would 4 gig and I have yet to see any program even gimp editing full size images from my Nikon D700 come even close to that figure.
I would be thinking more of firefox and eclipse. OTOH, I hear bad things about imagemagick builds with high quanta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
I have checked on the net for benchmarks between i386 and AMD64 and there is no obvious overall install that is faster.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ x86-64 represents a substantially higher lowest common denominator than IA32 (e.g. wrt SIMD), which may matter for pre-compiled distributions.
On Thu, 17 Oct 2013, zlinw@mcmedia.com.au wrote:
enviroment for wine ineffect requires an almost complete parrellel install of a 32 bit system. It seems to me it would be easier simply to install i386 and avoid the pain.
It seems that the smallest desktop hard drive you can buy now is 500G. For SSD the minimum size would be about 120G but that's still a lot. Whatever the disk space requirements are for dual-arch it's not going to be a lot when compared to any storage you can buy or any storage that might have shipped with a AMD64 system.
There it appears only to be a minor issue in that the maximum memory for a single process would 4 gig and I have yet to see any program even gimp editing full size images from my Nikon D700 come even close to that figure.
Unless something has changed recently it's not 4G. The way Linux worked was that the kernel memory and the memory for any process would need to fit into 4G. Typically it would be 1G of address space for the kernel and 3G for the application. Although the difference between 3G and 4G probably doesn't matter to most people. Another possibility is running an AMD64 kernel with i386 user-space, this works quite well (even the 32bit modutils will load 64bit kernel modules). If you do that then a process gets very close to 4G of address space (due to heap/stack/code areas you aren't going to get quite 4G).
I have checked on the net for benchmarks between i386 and AMD64 and there is no obvious overall install that is faster.
If you use 64bit instructions then some mathematical operations are a lot faster. Also the extra registers in the AMD64 ISA make a huge difference in some algorithms. Some people have compiled a 32bit address system with 64bit operations and all AMD64 registers. For everything that doesn't require more than 3G of address space per process it should beat i386 or standard AMD64 builds.
It would seem that the simplest path would be to install Debian 7 i386, this would allow the latest wine to be installed without any problems and I cannot myself see any down side. The system would still have access to the all the memory the only limitation being the 4gig process limit.
You don't want to use PAE. But i386 user-space with AMD64 kernel works well.
There may be an issue with the speed of memory access on some of the latter video cards with large amounts of memory availible as this memory will need to be bank switched. This does not appear to be a problem at this stage.
Generally they will reserve some physical address space below 4G for that so it shouldn't be a problem.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm, I have two main systems both efectively identical I will install i386 on one of these this will allow wine to be installled easily and the other one can be used to allow a comparison to be done between the two versions (i386 and AMD64) using 3D intensive software (a terrain simulation) to see what if any differences exist.
Also AMD64 is gaining in popularity particularly among developers. A bug that only affects AMD64 is likely to be fixed faster than one which only affects i386. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
Some people have compiled a 32bit address system with 64bit operations and all AMD64 registers. For everything that doesn't require more than 3G of address space per process it should beat i386 or standard AMD64 builds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI Those people are strange and should be avoided.
On Fri, 18 Oct 2013 13:45:22 Trent W. Buck wrote:
Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
Some people have compiled a 32bit address system with 64bit operations and all AMD64 registers. For everything that doesn't require more than 3G of address space per process it should beat i386 or standard AMD64 builds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI
Those people are strange and should be avoided.
The Wikipedia page you cited notes that some operations are 32% faster with X32, that's a significant difference. http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/11/execmod-and-se-linux-i386-must-die/ http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/12/fixing-execmod-textrel-problems-in-lenny... http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/16/mplayer-squeeze-selinux/ It also notes that the average is 5% to 8% improvement. One thing that's been done on i386 for similar performance gains is to use libraries that have self- modifying code to avoid using a register for offsets. Above are the URLs for some blog posts I've written about this. I have done a fair bit of work maintaining an alternate repository for mplayer and other video related packages to deal with the fact that the Debian maintainers and upstream want the extra 5% or so performance while I want systems that are difficult to exploit. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
participants (3)
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Russell Coker -
trentbuck＠gmail.com -
zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au