x32 abi support?
Matthew Garrett
mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
Wed May 16 13:31:34 UTC 2012
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 09:18:32AM -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
> I noticed this article:
>
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwMTk
>
> Has this been discussed on fedora?
x32 is mostly beneficial in that it reduces pointer size and so memory
consumption, with the side benefit that it may also provide slightly
higher performance due to being able to fit more in cache. But this is
only true for a pure x32 system. If you have any applications that need
to be 64-bit (ie, anything that is going to need more than 4GB of
address space, which is very different from needing more than 4GB of
RAM) then you need to have two copies of your libraries and suddenly
your memory benefits have entirely vanished.
So, overall, x32 is only really beneficial for embedded platforms rather
than general purpose ones. As Josh says, if there's sufficient interest
then it could potentially be implemented as a separate architecture and
spend some time in secondary, but I don't know that there'd be a huge
benefit to Fedora to spend much time on it.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
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