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

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 07:32:29PM +0300, Eli Billauer 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.

Another thing I forgot:

Try building Firefox (with debug information and such). IIRC you'll need
more than 4GB of memory space. And this is far from being the only
program.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il |                    | a Mutt's
tzafrir at cohens.org.il |                    |  best
tzafrir at debian.org    |                    | friend