AMD64 vs i386 on a Dual Opteron Box

Andrew P. infofarmer at gmail.com
Wed Oct 12 07:25:03 PDT 2005


On 10/12/05, Nathan Vidican <nvidican at wmptl.com> wrote:
> We've been encountering some difficulty between
> OpenLDAP/nss/pam/FreeBSD/samba over the past few months and really since
> inception. After countless recompiles of samba, working with samba and
> openldap code, we've traced it to being an issue somwhere between
> freebsd and openldap using threads, a clean compile of openldap without
> using threads runs fine, but still seem to have inconsistency with nss
> portions of it.
>
> The conscencus accross a few different threads on various mailing lists
> seems to be to try running FreeBSD/i386 instead, therefore assuming
> perhaps that there are some issues with threading/openldap/nss_ldap on
> the AMD64/64-bit platform. We're currently running 5.3-RELEASE, I'm
> going to attempt 5.4-RELEASE/amd64 first, if the issues still arises,
> the next step would be to try 5.4-RELEASE/i386, and if the problem still
> exists... then back to trying to debug the whole situation.
>
> So, given the above information, my question is this:
>
> Knowing FreeBSD i386 can be run on AMD64 hardware, is there any
> disadvantage other than the obvious 64-bit support? We're using dual AMD
> Opteron based machines with 2GB ECC registered memory, so memory
> capacity shouldn't be an issue running 32bit, but how about smp support?
>
>
> Also, if anyone might have another idea or option to go with towards
> fixing the openldap/freebsd issue, that'd be even better still - but to
> be honest I lack the skills, time, and hardware neccessary to accomplish
> this on my own. I'm hoping that something between 5.3-RELEASE and
> 5.4-RELEASE can resolv the issue, or at least to isolate it to
> FreeBSD/OpenLDAP/Samba/nss_ldap/? as the cause.
>
> In short, i386 on AMD64 good, bad, why?
>
> --
> Nathan Vidican
> nvidican at wmptl.com
> Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
> http://www.wmptl.com/
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>

i386 is _exactly_ as good on amd64 as it is on i386.
Still amd64 is even better. If you can afford to lose
a couple of days more, try 6.0-RC1/amd64. It fixes
many things, and we'll try and help you debug your
setup from there. In his statements Scott Long
almost makes an impression that 6.0-RELEASE
will be more stable than 4.11 and 5.4.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list