[Gllug] Which architecture?

[Peter Corlett]

On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 02:34:27PM +0100, Matthew King wrote:
[...]
> Well that's not strictly true. You can run a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit
> userland, thus allowing for the possibility of a 64-bit chroot. Why you'd
> want to is left as an exercise for the reader.

You might want your processes to have a smaller footprint due to the shorter
pointers. The downside is that you'd be restricted to the plain x86 ISA
which has fewer registers so the performance is likely to be worse.

A quick perusal of the x86-64 ISA suggests that it would be possible to
build programs that have 16 general-purpose registers, but only 32 bit
pointers, by using a prefix byte on the relevant instructions. The shorter
pointer length may well improve performance.

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