ubuntu-mips team mailing list archive

[Kai-Cheung Leung <kcleung@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

However, will an user-space application that consume > 4GB memory be
able to run on an OS with n32 userland and n64 kernel?

Kaicheung

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Michael
Casadevall<sonicmctails@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> (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
>
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