[olug] Advice on a new rig

[Luke Dashjr]

On Tuesday 25 November 2008 09:19:44 am Obi-Wan wrote:
> I run 4GB of DDR2 with a 32-bit kernel, and I've never had any problems.
> Going beyond 4GB (not 3GB) requires 64-bit or hugemem kernel support.

Actually, anything beyond 1 GB requires HIGHMEM on x86_32 Linux. However, the 
OS-independent x86_32 limit is 3 GB, since PCI has a 1 GB mapping reserved.

> With 4GB, I page only occasionally -- usually during the aforementioned
> photo editing sessions.  The rest of the time, my RAM is all used for
> filesystem cache, since I do run a number of web & mail servers off this
> box.

Unless your hard drive is smaller than your RAM, the RAM will *always* be 
filled with cache. In some cases, Linux may even decide it best to page your 
programs in exchange for disk caching.

On Tuesday 25 November 2008 09:22:58 am Christopher Cashell wrote:
> I'm confused about why you would jump to PowerPC or MIPS for 64bit support. 
> As much as I'm a fan of the PowerPC architecture, there is *nothing*
> available in PowerPC or MIPS that can come anywhere close to modern x86-64
> CPU's when taking into account price, performance, flexibility, and legacy
> support.

Then why is PowerPC the platform of choice for the Wii, XBox360, and PS3?
I rarely run unmaintained software, and generally it should run fine in any 
emulator. To get any kind of 32-bit compatibility from x86_64, you need to 
depend on having a 32-bit OS installed anyway (minus a kernel). With PowerPC 
and MIPS, you can mix 32-bit and 64-bit apps a bit cleaner.