A Proposal To Go 64-bit Only With Fedora 23

[Cyber Killer]

How many Pentium 4 systems shipped with 4gb of ram?

Probably nearly none. But given the time they are around, most of them have upgraded the amount of memory already, so a better question is "how many of currently active 32bit cpu machines have over 1GB of ram?", and the answer to that is "the majority".

32bit cpus usable today include not only P4, but also Athlon XP, Pentium D, 1st gen Core Duo, 1st gen Intel Atom (in netbooks), Via C7 (in netbooks)... Due to stagnation in cpu performance, most of these are good enough for basic day to day desktop workloads even today.

[Nille]

That is not true and there are several (relatively) new games in Steam that are 32bit and when installing in 64bit distro complaint about missing libs....and the missing libs are the 32bit versions.

I had to manually install those 32bit libs no matter 64bit versions were installed.

I hat Quake an such games in mind. But if Steam titles Require libs to be installed by the User, the Steam for Linux is Dead in the near future.

[chrisb]

PAE doesn't suck....in office,etc. is slower than 64bit, yes, but with (some) 32bit games its faster than running those games in 64bit multilib.

PAE worked in all modern MoBos that i ever tried to do so and i try in every single new model i have the chance to use it just to make sure....if Mobo is certified or not to use PAE, i honestly don't give a f**k about it...how many consumer MoBos are certifified for Linux anyway ?....right.

Do you have any evidence that 32 bit code running in amd64 on a 64 bit processor has any performance hit? Because it shouldn't - 32 bit pointers are well supported on amd64 CPUs for obvious reasons.When people are taking about a 64-bit performance hit they mostly mean increasing memory usage which can lead to more swapping.

[AJSB]

Do you have any evidence that 32 bit code running in amd64 on a 64 bit processor has any performance hit? Because it shouldn't - 32 bit pointers are well supported on amd64 CPUs for obvious reasons.When people are taking about a 64-bit performance hit they mostly mean increasing memory usage which can lead to more swapping.

Some time there were made tests by Phoronix...there were two series of tests at different time frames...one showed produtivity apps running faster in 64bit than in 32bit PAE.
Another showed 32bit games been faster running in 32bit PAE vs 64bit multilib.

Besides this, i have no more evidence.

Anyway, the differences were never that dramatic...but that's not the only issue...the other issue is that its been discussed not only drop 32bit distro editions but also drop multilib on the long run because games are "mostly" static, witch is not always true.

In fact, in the past, static build of games was higly criticized here, and , OTOH, we could discusss, when a game is build static, how static it really is taking in account my fiddings with some games.

[AJSB]

I hat Quake an such games in mind. But if Steam titles Require libs to be installed by the User, the Steam for Linux is Dead in the near future.

Actually latest game with this problem that i found uses Source Engine...wait...never mind

Yes, i agree, all Linux games should be fully static build, if not, Linux (Gaming) won't go anywhere.

I defend that for...well....for ever i can remember !

Strangelly, some "enlighted" minds here thing static build is a big no-no...i simply can't see what could be the reason for that.

[lethal]

Don't kill x86_32!

1. There are still a lot of good 32 bit x86 machines around.
2. There is a plethora of 32 bit software around.
Actually I had a recompile of a system these days to support Gentoo multilib. It was neccessary due to a mesa version in the precompiled 32 bit compatibility libs that was too old.
But I noticed how much software (especially binary stuff) makes use of these 32bit libs. So if you'd kill off 32bit now tons of software would stop to run. And people are arguing that "Linux isn't a platform" cause you can't get commercial software to run on it. This move would not improve the situation.

No one is killing x86_32, this is about killing fedora on 32 bit.
You'll still have hundreds of other distros. Each distro has it's place, and fedora's place is in the 21st century.

[TheBlackCat]

Probably nearly none. But given the time they are around, most of them have upgraded the amount of memory already, so a better question is "how many of currently active 32bit cpu machines have over 1GB of ram?", and the answer to that is "the majority".

If they are people who are able to afford increasing their ram that much, then they are probably people who are able to afford one of the low-end systems people have been recommending.

[Cyber Killer]

If they are people who are able to afford increasing their ram that much, then they are probably people who are able to afford one of the low-end systems people have been recommending.

No, that are different things. Those people already have done that, they have a decent amount of ram already. So it's 0? investment vs 100-200? investment.

[Nille]

Yes, i agree, all Linux games should be fully static build, if not, Linux (Gaming) won't go anywhere.

Not static but they should ship with all required libarys. The Userspace is not knows for his API and ABI Compatibility. If a library gets a update that breaks ABI/API or on newer systems your steam games wont start.

[dungeon]

To me Fedora was always developer distro, so noting new here. It sounds fine to drop xserver and all 32bit arches at the same time, even in 22 why not.

If someone is not developer of some kind but uses Fedora i don't know what to say about that