On 30/06/2019 21:02, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher  writes:
>
>> On 30/06/2019 00:32, A. Dumas wrote:
>>> The work involved to maintain two concurrent releases (with a lot of
>>> customisations) is their main reason apparently, yes, while the vast
>>> majority of the install base (the Pis out there) isn't 64 bit compatible.
>>> But their main software man also keeps saying: give me one good reason why
>>> 64 bit is better than 32. See their blog on the new Buster release. Well,
>>> it gets a bit embarrassing with lost optimisations when the current chip is
>>> armv8, for crying out loud. He says it doesn't make a difference but I
>>> wonder.
>>
>> Wasn't the drive to 64 bit more about accessing more RAM?
>
> More address space. CPUs with only 32-bit logical addressing can still
> access more than 4GB physical RAM, but each process is still stuck in
> 4GB (often less in practice).

I remember coding a 6809 with 256K of ROM and 16k of RAM. In assembler.
Page switching YUK!


That’s a problem both for certain lagre
> applications, and for security improvements like ASLR.
>
> 64-bit GPRs are handy for some applications but rarely essential.
>
> For both Intel and ARM the 64-bit instruction sets double the number of
> architectural GPRs.

Ground penetrating radars?

Particularly on Intel where the 32-bit situation is
> pretty poor, that’s a big improvement for anyone writing in assembler.
>

Yebbut thats not an itrinsic feature of 64 bit acrhitectures.

Andf compilers *know* about that so its not JUST in assembler


Anyway I think the opinion set is converging on the fact that more RAM
is more important than a 64 bit distro


--
Canada is all right really, though not for the whole weekend.

"Saki"

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