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Covalent And Redhat Developing 64 bit Apache

Posted by Hemos on from the building-it-better-and-faster dept.

ruiner5000 writes "Well it is official. AMD has just sent out a press release announcing that Covalent and Redhat are developing a 64 bit version of Apache. "Covalent is developing 64-bit compatibility because we believe the upcoming AMD Opteron processor-based server systems will deliver superior performance and reliability for our easy-to-install Apache project server software," said Mark Douglas, senior vice president of engineering, Covalent Technologies. "Compatibility is essential, and we are cooperatively working to ensure optimal performance with the upcoming AMD Opteron processors." "

6 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. I'm pleading ignorance here.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative



    Can't they just MAKE apache on a 64 bit computer?

    How much of the code is cpu-dependant!?

    1. Re:I'm pleading ignorance here.... by Lenolium · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've built apache on my multia, and on my PC164SX, both of which are 64-bit alpha machines, and it works just fine. So... I'm kindof confused about this article too. It sounds like AMD just payed about 200k or so for someone to type 'make'

  2. 64bit Apache Already Available? by lylonius · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you set and export your shell environment variable CFLAGS="-m64", you already have native 64-bit support for Apache. The Sun SPARC architecture has been 64-bit for a long time now.

    The "real" problem is getting all of your supporting modules to compile with 64-bit support as well. I've successfully compiled mod_php with the -m64 flag, but since our shop utilizes the Sleepycat Berkeley db3 library (which doesn't support the flag), we cannot build db3 support into mod_php.

    1. Re:64bit Apache Already Available? by Jeff+Trawick · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yes, I've run Apache 2 as a 64-bit process on AIX and Tru64 as well. And Apache 2 has run as 64-bit process on HP-UX for ia64 for some time.

      There have been a few assume-32-bit bugs found here and there and there probably are a few more still out there, but in general people should expect Apache 2 to already work in 64-bit mode with the caveat that it hasn't been tested as much as in 32-bit mode.

  3. Re:Advantage to 64bits by pyrotic · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://aap.sourceforge.net/patchinfo.html

    SGI had people working on 64 bit support back in the days of Apache 1.36. Their big thing with 64 bit support was to cache huge amounts of static data with a new cacheing module, using the 64 bit address space. AFAIK there is curenlty no maintainer to this code and ASF didn't merge it into the main tree.

  4. Re:Grassroots by mexilent · · Score: 2, Informative

    Covalent happens to employ about half of the apache developers--and it has for many years. At least these folks have a small, scrappy upstart company to work for...instead of /\/\icro$oft. How do you think apache would turn out if _that_ company started to commandeer open source projects?

    Even open source developers gotta eat, brother--and Covalent's as gooda place as any to pay the bills.

    --
    -- Know Nukes!