On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:35:05 +0100, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Kevin Fenzi (kevin(a)scrye.com) said, in the FESCo meeting summary:
> * Architecture Support
>
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ArchitectureSupport [...]
- install x86_64 kernel on 32-bit OS where appropriate
Could you please provide more public background for this FESCo decision?
Particularly why not to automatically install the whole x86_64 distro where
appropriate? The DVD media should contain both arches as in the real world
found out the users are not aware if they have 64bit-capable hardware.
x86_64 provides CPU instruction set + ABI improvements which usually overcome
its only performance disadvantage of larger addresses, some benchmarks at:
http://www.amd64.org/fileadmin/user_upload/pub/64bit_Linux-Myths_and_Fact...
Guessing some software (codecs?) may fallback on 64-bit to unoptimized C code
instead of some assembly one but Fedora would at least show the usefulness of
the updates of such software for the x86_64 arch.
Regards,
Jan