On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:37:25AM -0800, Chris Maness wrote: > Wojciech Puchar wrote: > >> Since a Xeon Quad Core is a 64bit processor, would it work ok with > >> FreeBSD? Or would the adm64 release be better for that chip? > > > > don't be suggested by "amd" in port name. it's for AMD64-compatible > > processor, for example your xeon > Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I am currently running FreeBSD 7.0 the > regular i386 release. I would prefer to keep it that way if migration > to the 64bit release would mean rebuilding from scratch
You'll have to remove and re-install all ports to make them 64-bits as well. > (there is > probably an easier way to convert an i386 release to a amd64 release). Not really. You could do a cross-build to another partition, but you'd have to have one available. > Another poster seemed to indicate that the i386 release would run just > fine on a quad core chip. It should. > Would there be a major performance gain with amd64 over that of the i386 > build on a Xeon Quad Core? It will depend on your workload. If your machines were strapped fo address space on i386, switching to amd64 (with enough RAM) will help. In "long" (64-bit) mode, amd64 compatible CPUs have more registers available, so that will speed up things. On the other hand, pointers and longs are 64-bit numbers instead of 32-bit, which will make the code somewhat larger. Run some benchmarks that are relevant for you on i386 and re-run them after you've switched to amd64 to know for sure. I've been running amd64 since 5.4 on both Athlon64 and recently Core 2 Quad without problems. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
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