ABI for i386 binaries under FreeBSD-amd64

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 09:39:24AM +0200, David Naylor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have seen that recently on the mailing list there has been a discussion on
> running i386 FreeBSD binaries under an amd64 system.  As far as I have been
> able to read there does not appear to be anyway of achieving this except
> though either a chroot/jail or vitalization.  I think this is a short fall
> of FreeBSD currently as there are still proprietary i386 programs for
> FreeBSD that people may want to use under FreeBSD.  

Than they should run i386. You only _need_ (as opposed to "nice to play
with" :-) amd64 if you run out of address space on a typical workload.

And it's not a given that amd64 will be faster than i386. It depends on
the workload. If your workload is IO-bound (i.e. constantly waiting for
the disk to finish reading/writing) the CPU doesn't really matter.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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