32-bits vs 64-bits -- thoughts, issues, etc.

[DrJ]

Doc it is more complicated. It is kernel issue as well.

I thought of that as well as I was making the evening cocktail run. Both nVidia and VBox need kernel drivers; these would have to be 64-bit, as that is the underlying kernel. However, the user space is all 32 bit. That has to cause problems unless great care is given to its management (if it is possible at all).

That also ignores that nVidia 64-bit does not exist right now, but presumably will be coming soon.

 

[vivek]

Let me google it for you :e

32bit Compatibility with 64bit jails

Compatibility support which permits 32-bit jail binaries to be used on 64-bit systems to manage jails has been added.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.2R/relnotes.html and http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/freebsd-72-review-improved-virtualization.html

Default /dev rules inside jails are designed with security in mind. This is configurable and well documented in man page. Also, you need /proc stuff for Linux. This can be also mounted in a jail.

 

[DrJ]

With respect, I could not find any information on kernel drivers in your suggested pages.

 

[vivek]

I'm not sure about kernel drivers but 32bit desktop can be dumped inside jail on amd64 for sure. Are you talking about your other thread?

 

[DrJ]

Are you talking about your other thread?

No. Say I want to run VBox in a jail that has my desktop stuff, which has a 32-bit userland; the host runs a 64-bit kernel. I wish to run VBox in that jail as a part of the general desktop. How do I do so?

 

[vivek]

You can't have vbox in jail (but I'm not sure about it as I never tried vbox on freebsd or linux or inside jail). What you can do is install all normal 32bit stuff in jail including desktop, Linux flash, wine and other stuff.

Another idea, get VMWARE Server ESXi 64 bit free version. Now you can install all sort of operating systems on top of it. I've done this in our lab and we run virtually all operating system in GUI mode. We have 16GB RAM and RAID-10 storage on server. You can load FreeBSD and another Linux distro and/or Windows vista / xp can be done with 4GB RAM and your 64bit CPU. What kind of hardware spec do you have?

 

[DrJ]

You can't have vbox in jail

I'm taking the liberty to make a very large snip here. It makes sense that you can run i386 in amd64 as long as you don't need kernel modules. That may well muck things up.

ESXI (or however it is capitalized) is a whole 'nother layer. It may make sense, but it is another issue. Can my goals be achieved reasonably in straight FreeBSD?

 

[vivek]

There is only one way to find out -- try it out yourself and may be write a little tutorial in how-to section I could have done this myself but really don't have free time in hand...

Oh, ESXi itself can be booted from USB. It is super fast and it is not slow like vmware server 2.0 which runs on top of Windows or Linux host. However, ESXi don't support all hardware out there.. it is designed for people with deep pockets. I'd suggest you go with 32bit jails. Oh and FreeBSD 8.0 will also have native XEN dom0. You can boot Linux or windows. It is scheduled to released in q3 2009.

 

[DrJ]

This is part of a hard-money decision. I have no 64-bit computers at the moment; how I spend my money depends on what will work. And sorry, I won't spend that money on speculation on what *might* work, at least without a reasonable foundation.

This sounds harder that I want it to.

 

[wonslung]

i was under the impression that you could start a 32 bit jail in a 64 bit os but some stuff still will not work, like wine for instance.

 

[phoenix]

Absolutely NOT. All applications have to be compiled on amd64 in order to be usable on amd64.

BZZZZZZTTTT!!!! WRONG!!! And that's the whole beauty of the amd64 CPU architecture.

A 64-bit AMD CPU can run in one of three "modes":

• pure 32-bit (can only run 32-bit binaries)
• pure 64-bit (can only run 64-bit binaries)
• hybrid (boots in 64-bit mode, can run 32-bit binaries)

Thus, so long as you have 32-bit libraries, loader, ELF interpreter, etc installed on a 64-bit system, then you can run 32-bit binaries.

You'll notice there's a /usr/lib32 directory on a standard 64-bit FreeBSD install. That's to support 32-bit binaries.

You can also create a jail, and install a 32-bit userland in there, all running on top of a 64-bit kernel.

There's (according to AMD) virtually no performance penalty for running in hybrid mode.

Things on the Intel side are similar, with a few peculiarities, but it also works well in practise.

 

[Oko]

BZZZZZZTTTT!!!! WRONG!!! And that's the whole beauty of the amd64 CPU architecture.

I was talking about OpenBSD amd64 which is honest fully 64-bit operating system. I have never run FreeBSD amd64 in my life. Look at my original post and disclaimer! You told me a lots of interesting information and to be frank with you some of them quite surprising.

 

[hedwards]

For desktop usage I will always go with 32bit operating systems, especially all multimedia stuff.

At this point pretty much the only stuff that doesn't work are Flash, wine and some proprietary drivers as far as basic desktop stuff goes.

And at least for the nVidia drivers there's been serious work going on in recent times, so we should have a proper driver in the foreseeable future.

Or in other words, there isn't really a whole lot that one needs to give up if one wishes to use amd64, it is a tier 1 architecture after all.

EDIT: Unfortunately at this time virtual box doesn't seem to compile at all on AMD64, or rather a few of the dependencies don't.

 

[fronclynne]

At this point pretty much the only stuff that doesn't work are Flash, wine and some proprietary drivers as far as basic desktop stuff goes.
. . .
EDIT: Unfortunately at this time virtual box doesn't seem to compile at all on AMD64, or rather a few of the dependencies don't.

I have heard that wine doesn't work/compile, I don't know. I'll take your word for it.

graphics/gnash works here, somewhat. Youtube, at least. Meh. "rich media" is asenine at best.

emulators/virtualbox compiles fine (including dependancies), runs fine (okay, 8-CURRENT, amd64, blah blah), but the video on ATI does funky stuff. can't use it, graphics-wise. ymmv.

But, please, be more specific about what doesn't work. the FUD is annoying.

 

[phoenix]

I was talking about OpenBSD amd64 which is honest fully 64-bit operating system. I have never run FreeBSD amd64 in my life. Look at my original post and disclaimer! You told me a lots of interesting information and to be frank with you some of them quite surprising.

Yes, but this is a FreeBSD forum, with questions relating to FreeBSD, so giving a strictly OpenBSD response (which is incorrect for FreeBSD) is not such a great thing to do.

While OpenBSD may currently run as a "pure" 64-bit OS, there's nothing technologically stopping it from running 32-bit apps (the CPU architecture supports it). All they have to do is add support to the linker/ELF loader to detect 32-bit apps, and to load the 32-bit libs, and voila! Presto-chango, support for 32-bit apps is enabled on 64-bit OpenBSD.

 

[aragon]

I've been running amd64 on the desktop for over a year. There are very few things now that one can't do in amd64 FreeBSD 7. The notable ones for me:

* wine
* mplayer's win32-codecs

I weened myself off wine over a year ago - there is so much great (sometimes better) open source software that I don't need wine. I still use native Windows for video editing, but that didn't work in wine anyway.

Lack of win32-codecs isn't a biggie - I've only been unable to play certain WMV files which I very rarely encounter. All other WMVs that I encounter are playable as win32-codecs is only needed for very specific codecs (the latest HD WMV stuff, IIRC).

Flash works in the linuxulator. Java works and runs 64bit (install java/diablo-jdk16). QEMU works (need to test virtualbox still). Any other uncertainties?

 

[DrJ]

Any other uncertainties?

No, that pretty much covers it. I have done some reading, and it seems that the linuxator does 32 bit fine. So the Adobe Reader should work too (does it have the same issue unloading ld as does i386?). Yes, the poppler-based PDF viewers have improved a lot, but there still are files that need Reader.

I've read many reports that VBox works fine, but there still are some issue with 8. Those will be fixed. And nVidia is moving on their 64 bit driver, so that should be resolved in the next few months.

I think my next box will be amd64. I can always go back to i386 if must needs be.

 

[aragon]

Can't comment on Adobe Reader as I use xpdf only.

I traded an nvidia card for an ATI just so that I could run amd64 with decent 2D for the past year. I'm hoping the radeon/radeonhd devs will have 3D working on RV6XX before nvidia get their 64 bit drivers in motion.

 

[DrJ]

I'm hoping the radeon/radeonhd devs will have 3D working on RV6XX before nvidia get their 64 bit drivers in motion.

Good luck with that. I'd bet an alpha version of the nVidia driver is out in two months, maybe three. 3D on ATI I'd guess is a year or two off. Personally it does not matter to me, but I have found the nVidia driver to be very good.

 

[blah]

Decent 2D is available for nvidia on amd64, too. Nouveau driver is fast enough to play HD video without lags. On my Core 2 Duo E8400 it takes around 2% CPU utilization to show 1080p content using Xvideo (on G94) in fullscreen with 1600x1200 resolution and 40~46% to decode it from h264 on mplayer. With advent of TTM/GEM memory manager and driver pixmaps I bet nouveau will be even faster for 2D.

 

[wonslung]

I'm very happy with my transiston to freebsd amd64.
at the end of the day the faster boot times and more stable os are worth the 2 or 3 things it doesn't do yet. I've never been a fan of windows so switching to linux wasn't hard. Looking back on this, i probably should have went straight to freebsd. The first time i remember seeing anything about it was on techtv years ago on a show called "The Screen Savers" and it stayed in the back of my mind. At some point i was looking for a QOS router and stumbled onto the pfsense project, at that point i was already using linux 100% of the time. After using pfsense and seeing how stable it was i decided to try freebsd as my desktop. Now i use it for most of my computers.

I still have 2 linux htpc's Does anyone know if xbmc works well enough on freebsd? If it works at least AS well as it does on linux i'll probably switch those machines over too.

 

[aragon]

Decent 2D is available for nvidia on amd64, too. Nouveau driver is fast enough to play HD video without lags.

Unfortunately at the time I switched to amd64 nouveau was broken and nv was slow, and both had little hope of improvement without nvidia providing hardware documentation. On a personal note, I'd rather keep buying hardware from a vendor that supports open source - AMD and Intel have both been quite good in this regard, while nvidia haven't.

 

[morbit]

I was talking about OpenBSD amd64 which is honest fully 64-bit operating system. I have never run FreeBSD amd64 in my life. Look at my original post and disclaimer! You told me a lots of interesting information and to be frank with you some of them quite surprising.

If you would like to run "pure" FreeBSD amd64 system, just put WITHOUT_LIB32=true in src.conf and build kernel without

  options         COMPAT_IA32             # Compatible with i386 binaries

line.

 

[wonslung]

Unfortunately at the time I switched to amd64 nouveau was broken and nv was slow, and both had little hope of improvement without nvidia providing hardware documentation. On a personal note, I'd rather keep buying hardware from a vendor that supports open source - AMD and Intel have both been quite good in this regard, while nvidia haven't.

nvidia DOES support opensource

they actually need kernel features to make this work properly

From what i understand, the main issue with nvida freebsd amd64 driver was due to kernel code.

There is a great nvidia driver for freebsd i386 and there should be an amd64 driver soon (2-3 months)

If i understood things correctly there was a lot of issues that needed to be resolved at the kernel level before they could finish the driver and that was up to the freebsd kernel team....but i may be wrong.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=41545

and personally the nvidia drivers on linux are 10 times better than the ati drivers....i'm sure the same will be true for freebsd eventually

 

[aragon]

nvidia DOES support opensource

they actually need kernel features to make this work properly

From what i understand, the main issue with nvida freebsd amd64 driver was due to kernel code.

There is a great nvidia driver for freebsd i386 and there should be an amd64 driver soon (2-3 months)

If i understood things correctly there was a lot of issues that needed to be resolved at the kernel level before they could finish the driver and that was up to the freebsd kernel team....but i may be wrong.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=41545

I know all that. What I meant is that they don't support open source in the manner of providing open source drivers or hardware documentation so that the community can develop open source drivers. All their "support" is in the form of closed up binaries.