[Haifux] Running 32 bit applications (Firefox?) on 64 bit machines

[Haggai Eran]

If all you want is the overall RAM to exceed 4 GB, I think you could use a
32 bit PAE kernel. However, the x86_64 architecture has some other benefits,
such as a larger number of registers. I heard you could sometimes
applications perform better because of that.

Haggai

On 20 August 2011 19:32, Eli Billauer <eli at billauer.co.il> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> It has suddenly hit me, that there's no apparent reason to run most
> executables as 64 bits on a x86_64 machine. I mean, what for? It's not like
> I expect Firefox to address 1 GB of RAM. If it does, let it crash. On the
> other hand, plugins and other binaries for 64 bits is a headache. Flash
> player tops the list, I suppose.
>
>
> So it really makes me wonder: Why are the preinstalled binaries on a 64 bit
> machine, well, 64 bit executables? I run a 64 bit machine because I want the
> *overall* RAM to exceed 4 GB, but except for virtual machines, I don't
> expect any application to have problems with the 32 bit limitation.
>
>
> Insights?
>
>
>  Eli
>
>
> P.S. Just changed my Firefox to 32 bits. Had to install some libraries
> manually to get Flash Player going: yum install libpk-gtk-module.so
> libcanberra-gtk-module.so libcurl.i686 (thanks goes to strace as usual).
>
> --
> Web: http://www.billauer.co.il
>
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