Is 64 bit Fedora OK? With which CPU?

[Philip Prindeville]

Dave Jones wrote:

>On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 04:11:11PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 15:57, dondi_2006 wrote:
> > 
> > > I have to buy a new PC for my desktop. I want to run
> > > Fedora on it, because I already know it well from University.
> > > But I am not sure if it is OK to go with a 64 bit CPU or stick
> > > to 32 bit ones.
> > 
> > You should base that decision on price/performance.  You always
> > have the option of running the 32-bit OS on a 64 bit CPU if
> > you want.  You probably won't see a big performance difference
> > anyway unless you have more than 4 gigs of RAM.
>
>not necessarily true. The x86-64 architecture brings a bunch
>of additional features/optimisations in addition to an enlarged
>address space.
>
>		Dave
>
>  
>


The large address space is full of potential...

I'd like to see someone do the following:

* a 64-bit (or 48-bit) address space implementation of a GPL memory leak
finder like Rational's "Purify".

* zoned memory GC like what NextStep used to have... And have applications
like FireFox, Emacs, etc. have each "session" (main window, tab, etc) use a
single zone... And then when closing a file, session, tab, etc. just 
have it do a
super-quick release of then entire zone. This would be a lot faster than 
doing
a bunch of individual "free"s and trying to maintain the integrity, 
checking, etc.
of the heap when the whole session is going away in any case. Of course, 
that's
no replacement for diligently tracking memory usage. ;-)

Too late to ask Santa.

-Philip