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by Const-me 2577 days ago
> Doesn't Debian support 32-bit systems?

Yes. But I think it’ll only a matter of time before they stop, too.

> using 64-bit has little value if you have less than 8 Gb of RAM.

Address space brings much value. No need to worry about address space fragmentation, also you can safely use memory mapping, even for large files.

Extra registers also very nice performance-wise, both general purpose r8-r15 and vector xmm8-xmm15.

Finally, when you code AMD64 you can rely on having at least SSE1 and SSE2 SIMD, their support is a requirement.
1 comments
microtonal 2577 days ago
Yes. But I think it’ll only a matter of time before they stop, too.

It will probably take at least 5-10 years before all major distributions will stop and their support periods will be over.

Once we are there, there is still NetBSD and OpenBSD. Heck, NetBSD still supports VAX.

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Const-me 2577 days ago
> Heck, NetBSD still supports VAX.

I wonder about the level of VAX support. Do they just have old code lying in the repository, do they build it, or do the devs actually have a working VAX machine and they test new builds?

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cat199 2577 days ago
Not a dev, but as i understand it as a Vaxstation 4000 owner who boots up from time to time to enjoy the beeps:

a) build.sh allows cross compilation, which helps with build validation (although openbsd built native until they dropped vax ~3y ago)

b) there are a few dedicated devs on vax. these pretty much do the work as a hobby, and things are best effort, but generally in sync with the rest of the tree. most of these own a vax or three, but you can also run on SimH and probably other vax emulators.

c) really, the system source is modular enough that adjusting device drivers for well documented hardware which has existed for years, and tweaking a few already-implemented since the 80s macro primitives is most of what is needed to keep things running -most of the adjustments to the system itself happen higher up the stack (e.g in the generic c portion of the kernel, or in the c library). Granted, this does mean knowing the ISA and HW in and out, and having skills to debug/reason about low-level instruction/hardware sorts of issues, but, hey, that's who codes open source os'es anyway.. Besides, if you are a true VAX BSD UNIX hacker, you've been tweaking your kernel sources since you manually toggled in the 3BSD bootstrap in 1979 :b

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acct1771 2577 days ago
At what stage does it become an endorsement to use insecure architecture?
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