Ubuntu Developer Talks Down Impact Of 32-Bit Changes For Ubuntu 19.10

[Luke_Wolf]

https://lwn.net/Articles/548838/

The x32 project site lists two SPEC benchmarks that show particularly good benefits. MCF, a network simplex algorithm making heavy use of pointers, shows x32 with a 40% advantage over x86-64. Crafty, a chess program made up predominantly of integer code, shows x32 with a 40% advantage over ia32 ...

Marketing... Hook... Line... Sinker. You fell for it.

There's a reason nobody takes synthetic micro-benchmarks seriously. The reason is that they don't accurately represent the real world. Let me ask you a few simple questions: Let's assume it were faster in the real world not in synthetic land where you can make anything happen, why did both Debian and Gentoo drop the arch? Why didn't Red Hat take this 40% speed up and run with it? Hell... why isn't Clear Linux x32, after all it's designed to draw as much performance out of Linux as possible right? You really think these companies are going to leave a 40% improvement on the table when Intel's CPUs are improving at maybe 5% a year? Seriously?

No. Here let me blow your mind for a second, in the real world most programs spend most of their time waiting on input (whatever the source), so most real applications only care about the race back to idle. Furthermore outside of special situations like games it takes longer to read from the network or from a file, or whatever it's waiting on than to actually process its reaction, and here is something to send you into total shock: in the real world the actual data dwarfs the data structure backing it. All the cutting down on pointers in the world won't save you from that 20MB PNG or HTML file you just mapped into memory,

[oiaohm]

Could you shut the f*ck up and stop talking about things you know nothing about?!

$ file Creative_Cloud_Set-Up.exe
Creative_Cloud_Set-Up.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows, UPX compressed
$ wine Creative_Cloud_Set-Up.exe
wine: Bad EXE format for Z:\home\scx\software\wine\apps\adobe_creative_cloud\Creative_Cloud_Set-Up.exe.

I didn't say that Photoshop CC 2019 is a 32-bit application. I said that it requires WoW64, and this is f*cking true. I have explained this to you many times, quoting statements from WINE developers.

I am correct you don't have to use Creative_Cloud_Set-Up either to install Photoshop you can login with web-browser go into the right place in your account and download a 64 bit installer. You just had a option part fail. Its a tool to make it simpler for those who don't know there way through the adobe site.

You are f*cking m*ron!
I mentioned clearly that Photoshop has a 64 bit installer. Creative Cloud Set-Up.exe is a 32 bit installer. So you are using a part I am not talking about.

What the Creative Cloud Set-Up does is log into your account and go to the right section and download the 32 bit or 64 bit installer for the programs you have licensed and then runs them. Basically is something you don't require at all if you manually by browser log into your account and download the installers.

Really the Creative Cloud Set-up tool is about the last 32 bit adobe thing. If it will run hangover you only running it once.

Only think Photoshop need WoW64 because you don't know the different install options like the one of login with a browser and download the 64 bit full installer. Yes adobe provides this option because in different business set-up Creative Cloud Set-Up never works due to anti-virus and firewalls in use.

[Raka555]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

Marketing... Hook... Line... Sinker. You fell for it.

There's a reason nobody takes synthetic micro-benchmarks seriously. The reason is that they don't accurately represent the real world. Let me ask you a few simple questions: Let's assume it were faster in the real world not in synthetic land where you can make anything happen, why did both Debian and Gentoo drop the arch? Why didn't Red Hat take this 40% speed up and run with it? Hell... why isn't Clear Linux x32, after all it's designed to draw as much performance out of Linux as possible right? You really think these companies are going to leave a 40% improvement on the table when Intel's CPUs are improving at maybe 5% a year? Seriously?

No. Here let me blow your mind for a second, in the real world most programs spend most of their time waiting on input (whatever the source), so most real applications only care about the race back to idle. Furthermore outside of special situations like games it takes longer to read from the network or from a file, or whatever it's waiting on than to actually process its reaction, and here is something to send you into total shock: in the real world the actual data dwarfs the data structure backing it. All the cutting down on pointers in the world won't save you from that 20MB PNG or HTML file you just mapped into memory,

Wel actually the most time is spend waiting for memory access. Thats why 32 bit apps can be much faster than 64bit apps.

To try and understand what I am going on about, look at this clip and forward to 30min 30s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

Edit:
32bit has better cache hit ratio than 64bit.
As you can (hopefully) see from that clip. This can be HUGE for certain work loads.

[the_scx]

I am correct you don't have to use Creative_Cloud_Set-Up either to install Photoshop you can login with web-browser go into the right place in your account and download a 64 bit installer. You just had a option part fail. Its a tool to make it simpler for those who don't know there way through the adobe site.

You are f*cking m*ron!
I mentioned clearly that Photoshop has a 64 bit installer. Creative Cloud Set-Up.exe is a 32 bit installer. So you are using a part I am not talking about.

What the Creative Cloud Set-Up does is log into your account and go to the right section and download the 32 bit or 64 bit installer for the programs you have licensed and then runs them. Basically is something you don't require at all if you manually by browser log into your account and download the installers.

There is only a 32-bit installer for the 64-bit edition ("AdobePhotoshop20-mul_x64.zip"). And this proves that you are a pathetic troll!

https://www.playonlinux.com/es/app-3489-Adobe_Photoshop_CC_2019.html

$ file Set-up.exe 
Set-up.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
$ wine Set-up.exe 
wine: Bad EXE format for Z:\home\scx\software\wine\apps\adobe_creative_cloud\AdobePhotoshop20-mul_x64\Set-up.exe.

[Nocifer]

May I advise to use some other abbreviations for architecture names. Commonly, x86-32, i386, i686 are names for 32-bit ISA, and x86-64, amd64 are names for 64-bit ISA.

"x32" is a gcc target for a 64-bit ISA, so that might cause some misunderstanding, since x32 is actually 64-bit.

Yeah, I guess you're right, I even managed to mix and match these terms myself in the post you quoted. I've only been using 'x32' because I noticed that too many people seem to be getting confused by 'x86' and its variants, and tend to prefer x32/32-bit and x64/64-bit, so I tried to go with the flow; people are already very confused and/or misinformed about this whole 32-bit deprecation and the role x86 plays in modern computing systems, so I opted to at least settle on easily understandable terms in order to avoid even more confusion.

The number one problem here is that people want support for GAMES that are not even native to Linux.

No, the number one problem here is twofold:

a) Windows, both the OS itself and its most widely used applications (games, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and even a good few driver vendors to name some major cases), is x86_64 at its core but carries with it a significant x86_32 legacy that won't be going away any time soon, not only because of the need for backwards compatibility, but mainly because the benefit that would come from rewriting everything in pure x86_64 is not worth the huge effort of doing so. What this means is that, if Linux deprecates its x86_32 libraries, the end result will be that contrary to Windows itself (despite the attempts by some people to "prove" the opposite) we will be the first OS to do so (Apple's toys are largely irrelevant) and we will no longer be able to run x86_32 Windows applications; but Windows itself will still be able to run them, which means vendors will still see no reason to get rid of their x86_32 legacy; which means that Linux will simply have crippled itself for no good reason.

b) Clueless people like you insist on having an opinion on a subject they clearly do not understand. Or at least, you being clueless is the best case scenario I can think of.

[Charlie68]

https://blog.simos.info/i-am-running...t-on-the-host/

Is this what Ubuntu calls user friendly? Should this be a human distribution?

[Delgarde]

Shouldn't you be praising them for that? I mean I get that you criticized them before for being NiH, but then they dropped those technologies and picked up wayland/systemd/GNOME. Why are you still whining? Are you just waiting for them to drop snap and use flatpak?

Because they're done a fair amount of damage in the process. Take Wayland, for example - they started out as enthusiastic supporters of the project, grandly declaring how they'd be one of the first to support it. Then they changed their minds and announced Mir - and as part of that, made a whole lot of demonstrably false claims about Wayland to explain why they'd ditched it... claims which Wayland developers wasted a lot of time trying to refute. And then after all that work to divide the community, they drop Mir, announce they're doing Wayland again, and just pretend none of their treachery happened.

So yeah, there are reasons a lot of people don't like them and certainly don't trust them.

[Dedobot]

Expected decision. Cannonical' cash flow depends of bussines users , not from "linux for general desktop " dreamers.

[StefanBruens]

https://lwn.net/Articles/548838/

The x32 project site lists two SPEC benchmarks that show particularly good benefits. MCF, a network simplex algorithm making heavy use of pointers, shows x32 with a 40% advantage over x86-64. Crafty, a chess program made up predominantly of integer code, shows x32 with a 40% advantage over ia32 ...

Out of 11 Integer and 14 Floating Point Benchmarks 1 (181.mcf) is faster on x32 than on x86_64. Crafty is about the same speed on x32 than on x64. They don't mention how many of the other benchmarks are (considerably) slower - apparently anywhere between 0 and 23.

As at least some applications require 64bit address space most libraries will be needed as 64bit libraries. Adding x32 libraries will require more RAM and will lower the cache hit rate.

Of the 32 bit address space, one 1 GByte is kernel exclusive, the rest is shared by:
- MMAPped libraries (.rodata, .text)
- stacks + stack protection pages
- heaps
- MMAPed data files

Each threads stack space has to be reserved, so there will be unused memory holes inbetween. Making the stack size smaller risks running out of stack, making it larger grows the holes.

MMAPEd files have to be put somewhere between the stack area and the heap area. As soon as a file has been mapped, the address space is further fragmented. Whenever you open and read a file, the file is MMAPed in the background by glibc, to avoid doing a syscall on each read(). If this fails, reading becomes significantly slower.

[Cerberus]

Ubuntu will be irrelevant very quickly if they to through with this stupidity. This is literally suicide if they do this.

Linux as a whole is irrelevant on the desktop except for niche uses and a small portion of enthusiasts. That is why it lingers at 1-2% of desktop market share after 28 years and why Steam Linux usage tends to be around 1% or less.