From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <473D4D67.90305@gmail.com> Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:57:27 -0500 From: Robert William Fuller User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (X11/20071011) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Current status of amd64 port? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: fc51ba62-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 erik quanstrom wrote: > On Thu Nov 15 18:14:18 EST 2007, vdharani@gmail.com wrote: >> this question also came up in bay area plan9 meeting. would be nice to >> know the status. i think unix adopted 32-bit earlier than other OSes. >> but for 64-bit, others have gone ahead. >> > > 64 bits is neither here nor there in a vaccuum. you want 64 bits if > a) you need more than 4GB of memory, or > a) those extra registers and direct vlong really matter for performance. > otherwise it's just a lot of extra zeros. Let's not commit a false alternatives fallacy here.... For example, the very large virtual address space of 64bit is useful, even without 4 GB of RAM. It allows all sorts of madnesses, such as memory mapping petabyte sized devices, or other programmatic conveniences such as large sparse vectors. Rob