Debian to Run on AMD64

dark-br writes to tell us TechWorld is reporting that the next Debian release will be able to run native on AMD64 processors for the first time. From the article: "The GNU/Linux 4.0 operating system, also known as "Etch," is planned for release in December, the group said. It will also have new security features, including encryption and digital signatures to ensure that downloaded packages are validated."

Comments

Very good news!

[QuantumFTL]

This is great news! I do contracting work for Maas Digital, and we have a 30-CPU renderfarm running a weird combination of Debian-32 and Red Hat 64 bit binary overlays. This should simplify things immensely!

At my other job (lylix.net), we had to move away from Debian to Gentoo for this reason (among others), so it's good to see it finally being

Re:Very good news!

[Celandine]

I'm running AMD64 Debian stable, like many other people. Just google for AMD64 sarge.

No, Sarge supports AMD64

[Mr.Ned]

http://www.debian.org/News/2005/20050811

Although Sarge (the current Debian stable) was not released with AMD64 support, it was added as an official, fully-supported architecture two months after the release -- way back in August of last year. TechWorld didn't read the recent news announcment correctly.

apt-get arch-upgrade?

[Advocadus Diaboli]

Running Debian/Sarge for i386 architecture on an AMD64 machine I wonder which steps I need to do if I want to change to AMD64 architecture with the new stable release in December. I guess apt won't have the arch-update command, but does it mean "reinstallation" or is there some smart strategy to migrate from i386 to x86_64?

Not a big deal

[Rorian]

First, this is just an announcement that 64bit support will be included in a stable branch, and secondly.. how many people truly benefit from 64bit?

Not to be negative, but I'm yet to see any benchmarks showing a marked improvement (for general PC usage) from going 32bit to 64bit. All it really does is let you use more RAM (REALLY not useful for the average desktop user at this time) and perform 64 bit calculations natively (really only useful for scientific applications, certainly useless for desktop users 99.99% of the time).

On the downside, binaries become larger (64bit addresses instead of 32bit) and old binaries may have to be emulated (if using a 64bit-only CPU).

Still, I guess it'll excite some desktop users, wanting the "full functionality" from their brand new 64bit dual-core system. Personally, I only went to a x86-64 chip recently because it was the best price/performance chip I could find - 64bit processing had and continues to have no positive influence on my computing experience.

P.S. Sorry to be so negative, but I'm sick of hearing all this phwoar! stuff about 64bit, when it really isn't that exciting. Guess I haven't had my morning coffee yet..

Re:Not a big deal

[macshit]

Apparently one of the biggest advantages of the amd64 architecture (aka x86-64) is not the 64-bitness at all (though there are some everyday benefits to that too -- e.g., visiting 1GB files in Emacs :-), but that in 64-bit mode it has more registers (not just wider ones), which allows the compiler to generate better code than it can for the anemic normal x86 architecture.

Good for learning

[canadiangoose]

I run Debian unstable on my home computers and Debian stable on my servers. That way I get lots of experience reparing debian, while having very reliable servers. It works quite well, in that every time another stable release is made, I already know the ins and outs of it and I'm ready to fix it in the freak chance that it would break.