[Gllug] couple of quick questions (USB stick and backups)

[Christian Smith]

On Sat, 25 Mar 2006, salsaman wrote:

>As for my USB pen issue, I found out it is due to my using a 64 bit
>version of Mandriva, which has some USB/hotplug "issues". After talking
>to mandriva support, I learned that surprisingly, it doesn't give any
>advantage installing a 64 bit version of Linux unless you are using >
>4GB of memory for a process. So I will be reinstalling that system with
>a 32 bit OS.


Not true.

Traditionally, x86 processors have but 8 general purpose registers to play
with, resulting in lots of register spills to memory, and a reason why
RISC processors have been easier to optimize for.

"64 bit" processes under AMD64 have 16 general purpose integer registers
to play with, and so can avoid hitting memory with register overflows and
generally operate more efficiently. You don't necessarily get hit with 64
bit integer constants everywhere, just 64 bit pointers (which earn't
constants and have little impact on performance). The same benchmark on 64
bit and 32 bit modes should generally run faster on the 64 bit mode, but
YMMV.


>
>Regards,
>Gabriel.
>

Christian

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