Slashdot Mirror
Covalent And Redhat Developing 64 bit Apache
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." "
I really don't trust corporations taking charge of a major Open Source project in any manner. Even if they stick to the GPL all the way I will still have doubts. First of all, AMD is another official supporter of DRM technology. I really don't trust the motives of companies' subvertion of Apache. If they continue to modify Open Source projects for the first real DRM equipt AMD, what prevents a major media corporation from funding an initiative to add DRM software to Apache and sell it to unsuspecting business customers? Why are they spending their time and resources to do something that Apache developers probably will get to in the near future? We should be more cynical with regards to corporate support of Open Source projects. In my opinion, critical Open Source projects should be managed and developed by an unbiased group of developers.
Can't they just MAKE apache on a 64 bit computer?
How much of the code is cpu-dependant!?
By the time this comes out the 970 will either be released or about to be released. Will this work also benefit Apache on PPC?
What is the advantage to running a 64bit web server? From what I've heard and read, pointers are still pointers and registers are still registers. I don't really see any area where a normal webserver would benefit.
In the webservers I run, most of the data that gets delivered is pretty small and most of the mathematically calculations can be done well within 32bits.
Am I an ignorant fool?
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
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.
For certain things, TUX is better. Apache has always been designed for correctness, security, and portability (they have code for mainframes using EBCDIC, Netware, BeOS...). Speed isn't one of their top priorities. At a dotcom I worked, we considered thttpd for static pages because of its speed, and apache for anything dynamic. We never got to the point where we had any real load (dot-com implosion) so we never got to the point where the speed diff waranted having the complications of two daemons. Apache has it's place, it's not for every situation.
TUX is much faster on most things, such as static pages. It's an in-kernel server, and takes advantage of things such as direct access to kernel buffers and DMA, something a user-land daemon such as apache can never do. But it's not as configurable, especially in dynamic content situations (can't do JSP or mod_perl, or php for example). That's fine, the default config has TUX forwarding stuff it can't understand to a userland daemon anyway. The recommended server? Apache. They're really complimentary, even in RedHats config.
In some respects, this makes a lot of sense for RedHat. They don't sell TUX. Hell both TUX and Apache are free/open source. They sell their OS (their version of it anyway) and support. To get OS sales, you need to have apps on your OS that people want, like Apache. As far as the support goes, more people using your OS, more support opportunities. Having a 64bit server can help, sicne the Opteron is more tuned for business sales, where they're more likely to buy support anyway. They also have the inside track a bit, since they did the porting and may gain some advantage by it.
"Apache is a very widely used *Linux*-based enterprise Web server application, and we are working with two leaders - Covalent and Red Hat - to offer simultaneous high-performance 32- and 64- bit computing to our customers,"
Hmm, I thought that Apache was pretty much run it everywhere, not just Linux. I guess this guy better tell Yahoo to stop running it on FreeBSD...
However as everyone else is saying, the actual situations where one would need 64-bit apps are rather limited. It might even result in a slight slowdown due to having to move a twice the data around with pointers and other such things.