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." "

Comments

Re:Grassroots

[pete-classic]

The worst thing that could happen under the GPL (which you brought into the discussion) is that we have to separate the wheat of their contributions from the chaff and fork.

The same isn't true with the Apache license, but the trump card with people playing games with Free Software is to fork.

Open Source projects should be managed and developed by an unbiased group of developers.

Do you mean unbiased, or biased the same way you are? While your biases (and mine) may be diametrically opposed to Covalent's, that doesn't make you (us) unbiased.

-Peter

Advantage to 64bits

[DrZaius]

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?

Re:Advantage to 64bits

[Jeff Trawick]

Lots of active connections handled by the same process can result in lots of mmaps. If these
are large you can start getting worried about
running out of address space with a 32-bit process.

Also, perhaps sendfile works with large file support on Linux in 64-bit mode :) that would be a nice improvement

For most situations a 64-bit Apache process isn't going to solve any problems right now. I imagine
it will just use more memory.

Re:Advantage to 64bits

[pyrotic]

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.

64bit Apache Already Available?

[lylonius]

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.

Re:Grassroots

[coene]

1. DRM has nothing todo with open-source

2. We should be more cynical with regards to corporate support of Open Source projects.

Huh? RedHat and Covalent employee hundreds of open-source programmers. We? We? Are you going to commit the code? This is a way for programmers to further open-source projects and still bring home the bacon at the same time.

3. In my opinion, critical Open Source projects should be managed and developed by an unbiased group of developers.

80% of the software on a Linux machine has components developed by corporations. If a program is very popular, someone is paying for the development by now. Linux Kernel, GCC, Samba, Apache, Sendmail, you name it.