Advice on changing to 64 bits

[Jerry Feldman]

On 02/14/2009 07:32 AM, Klaus-Peter Schrage wrote:
> Up to last week, I had Fedora running in subsequent versions 2 or so 
> to 10 on my old Pentium 4 system.
>
> Now I have a rather recent new desktop computer with much of the 
> latest and greatest hardware: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4 GB RAM, 
> harddrive with lots of Gagabytes and so on.
>
> Thinking about changing to 64 bits architecture (I have the i386 
> installation dvd, but not yet the i86_64 one), I was astonished how 
> little I found on pros and cons. So what would you advise?
>
> 1. Changing to 64 bits is a must for you.
> 2. You will benefit from it.
> 3. Keep your hands off, stay with 64 bits.
> 4. ...
>
> I should mention that I want to use virtualization (KVM, VMware 
> Server), and that the processor has Intel's hardware vitualization 
> capabilities.
>
I would strongly recommend updating to 64-bits. The big advantage is 
that you can run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications as well as develop 
both.  I've been in the 64-bit world since 1994 (Digital Alpha), and 
Linux itself has been 64-bits since roughly 1995 or 1996. A Tom 
mentioned, your 64-bit virtual machine managers can also run 32-bit or 
64-bit guests. While, in my experience, some applications may perform 
better as 32-bit applications, but many run better in 64-bits. There 
were some issues with Adobe Flash and Sun's Java plugins, but both are 
now available as full 64-bit plugins for Firefox. I'm not sure of the 
architecture of future filesystems, but possibly some drivers in the 
future will be 64-bit only).

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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