x86-64 box

[Christopher Browne]

On 6/8/05, JM <jerome-mhXWc29+iYPyG1zEObXtfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>         we will be buying a 64-bit box, i was wondering if i need to recompile my
> kernel for this?

If you recompile your kernel, then you'd better be prepared to
recompile the entirety of the software on your system.

-> It is a reasonable idea to run a plain old 32 bit "IA-32"
distribution on an AMD-64 system.  It will max out at about 2GB of
memory, but if you don't have more RAM, then you likely won't care. 
You will, in such a case, be using the AMD-64 as a "fast IA-32
emulator," which does work out quite well.

We have a box running like that which runs perfectly well.

-> The alternative is to get a complete kernel and user space all
compiled for use in 64 bit mode.

There is a version of Debian for AMD64; Lennart Sorensen is quite
active in efforts for that, and will doubtless point you to the right
place.

Red Hat Software has versions of Fedora and RHES/RHAS for AMD64.

SuSE has much the same.

For that matter, AMD64 is one of the supported platforms now for FreeBSD.

And if you want to make sure that your CPU will be busy compiling
things from now on, I believe that Gentoo has an AMD64 release.
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