[wplug] cores

Jonathan S. Billings wbanguna at gmail.com
Thu Mar 6 10:09:33 EST 2008


On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 06:11:29PM -0500, Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
> Zach wrote:
>> What type of kernel are you using specifically? Just curious if you
>> have to download a special 64-bit kernel or not. Can a single Linux
>> kernel support 32 and 64? I guess you needed an SMP one too.
>
> Now that SMP is standard even on laptops most every kernel is SMP enabled.  
> To use a 64bit vs 32bit you'll need to switch out all the userland programs 
> too.  You'll want to grab the 64 bit version of fedora or ubuntu (or insert 
> distro here).
>
> In most cases, however, you'll be better off sticking with 32 bit right 
> now.  The kinks are almost completely worked out, but many proprietary 
> tools still don't work with 64bit.

I've been using an x86_64 (64 bit) kernel for the past 2 years.  At
first it was more problematic, but since I'm keeping up to date with
Fedora releases, it's improved quite a bit.

I'd like to add that you can continue to use a 64 bit kernel and 32
bit apps.  On our clusters, we only use 64 bit kernels, even though a
lot of users have 32 bit only codes.  It makes sense if you have a lot
of RAM, in particular.  (A lot being defined as over 4G.)

On my workstation, I use an i386 firefox, and everything else x86_64.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <wbanguna at gmail.com>


More information about the wplug mailing list