kernel-PAE hangs at boot -- did I do something wrong?

Will Woods wwoods at redhat.com
Fri Apr 17 16:31:14 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 17:18 +0100, Mary Ellen Foster wrote:
> 2009/4/17 John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>:
> > Do you have an objection to running 64-bit Fedora? It obsoletes PAE, and
> > your applications can see all available RAM, not just the 4 Gbytes 32-bit
> > addresses give.
> 
> I've never tried 64-bit -- does it provide any concrete benefits? I've
> always been a bit intimidated by all of the posts about multilib
> craziness, and it didn't seem like it would be worth it ... :)

Yeah - as I understand it, identical code often runs faster when
compiled for x86_64, just because i386 is just so starved for
registers. 

There are some other benefits too - for example, hardware NX protection
is always available, so there's no weirdo software workarounds required
to protect you from buffer overflows and the like.

The only place it gets tricky is when you start trying to deal with
closed-source binaries, which are typically i386-only. But the most
common example - Adobe Flash - is available in a native Linux x86_64
binary these days.

And, if it really comes down to it, you can still run 32-bit binaries
thanks to the wonder and magic[1] of multilib.

If your hardware's capable I really can't think of a good reason to
avoid x86_64 anymore.

-w

[1] And agony and heartache from developers, release engineers, etc.




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