ubuntu-mips team mailing list archive

[Michael Casadevall <sonicmctails@xxxxxxxxx>]

(apologizes in advance for not responding, I accidentally was not
subscribed to the list)

An n64 userland is not desirable for a few reasons, the best setup
would be a n32 userland with n64 kernel, with specific optimizations
for anything that can truly benefit from the 64-bit userland. For the
vast majority of apps, 64-bits will not increase performance, and due
to the larger instruction size, reduce the amount of cache available,
actually degrading performance vs. a 32-bit userland. However, a
64-bit kernel will allow a process to break the 4GiB memory barrier,
as well as allowing the userland to execute n64 applications.

(w.r.t. to i386/x86_64, AMD added more registers when they revamped
the instruction set, from 4 to 16, hence why despite the above, there
is a general performance increase when going from 32-bit to 64-bit).
Michael