various rants about 7-currnet on AMD64

[Aryeh Friedman]

Sorry for the negative tone of this message but a little background
may help.... about 1.5 months ago I bought a new machine for personal
use [my only machine actually]... hw (upgraded from a p4-2.8):

intel e6850
intel p35 mobo (ihc9)
4 gb (ddr2-667 1GBx4)
500 gb sata
8600 GS nvidia (replaced for reasons below witha 5200 GT)
20" widescreen crt
direct cable connection to the net
hp deskjet 6980

Being a FreeBSD users since the mid 90's I obviously started with
it... in the quest for a working well tuned config (still a few issues
even with the current config):

6.2 (cvsup'ed to most recent PL) with i386 kernel
7-current  (cvsup'ed upto last night) i386
7-current amd64

The last shows the most promise so far:

Issues (all of which have been posted on -questions or -x11):

6.2 --

* Horrid non-SMP kernel performence (acceptable after SMP was added)

* Xorg (7.2) not working at all (vesa 640x480 with no mouse was the best I
managed)

* Many TCP/IP stack issues

* All native java builds fail with compile errors

* hplip fails immediately after install

* Doesn't recognize PATA drives if installed at the same time as SATA

7-CURRENT i386 --

* Horrid performence under default kernel needed to switch to
ULE/IPI_PREMEPTION/DEVICE_POLLING

* Kernel sees card after install of nvidia driver but Xorg (7.3)
doesn't recognize it (vesa 1024x768 only)... many address conflicts
reported... nv driver is no better

* All native java builds fail with compile errors

* hplip fails immediately after install

* Diablo-jdk15 completely broken for any GUI oriented code

7-CURRENT amd64

* Diablo-jdk15 completely broken for any GUI oriented code (jdk16
works well though)

* Many desktop ports fail with i386 vs. amd64 errors

* Nvidia-driver does not support amd64 (but nv works now but only at 1024x768)

Misc Rants:

CPUTYPE naming --

    For people who have been around for a while (read mid-90's) and
have never used any AMD mobo's we are used to "historical" differences
between early pentiums and amd equivs (for that reason I have never
bought a AMD machine)... so calling the 64bit x86 architure amd64 is
confusing and misleading.

HARDWARE.TXT --

    hardware.txt sheds absulutly no light on the above issue except to
make it clear that ia64 is not the right choice.

Suggestions:

* Figure out why xorg should care if your on a 32 or 64 bit addressing
bus (has to do with placing pci's buffers at the high end of RAM I
think)

* AMD64 should be recommended (or at least better documented) for all
dual-core machines

* Both nvidia.ko and the nv driver need to be improved (I know this is
nvidia's problem)