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Date:      Thu, 6 Apr 2006 10:09:24 -0400
From:      Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>
To:        Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Pros and Cons of amd64 (versus i386).
Message-ID:  <CBC0AAB4-EC80-44C8-BCCE-010DE99D4BC0@khera.org>
In-Reply-To: <ef10de9a0604052230y1efb39fdvd78ae6086e9218f7@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <ef10de9a0604052230y1efb39fdvd78ae6086e9218f7@mail.gmail.com>

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On Apr 6, 2006, at 1:30 AM, Nikolas Britton wrote:

> $200 bucks got me a Athlon 64 3000+ Venice and a ASUS A8V Motherboard.
> I'll be converting my Pentium 4 2.26GHz desktop system that has
> FreeBSD 6.1-PRERELEASE i386 on it, gcc is currently set to build with
> -march=pentium2 and -mtune=pentium4 via make.conf

If your running a desktop, I'd recommend sticking with 32-bit.  For a  
server doing a lot of I/O, go with 64-bit.  The Athlon will run very  
fast in both modes, but your software compatibility is better in i386  
mode.

> * How do I buildworld to amd64, and should I?

same as always.

> * What are the best gcc -mtune / -march flags to use?

i use none.  however, you could set the CPU type to something more  
specific; see the /etc/defaults/make.conf file for your options.

> * What do all the other -m flags do?

read the man pages.

> * What -march flags won't run on the AMD platform, will CPUTYPE=p2  
> work on AMD?

maybe. maybe not.  probably would, but recovering from a system with  
broken binaries is very hard.

> * Can I still build packages for other i386 (non 64-bit) systems?

no.

> * Where can I find more info about FreeBSD on AMD?

the freebsd amd64 project page has a little.  mostly there is no  
difference, but some drivers are not stable with large RAM which is  
the main reason for having 64-bit systems.

> * What did I forget to add here?
>





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