On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 11:01 PM, Glen Turner
<gdt@gdt.id.au> wrote:
On 18/06/09 11:03, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
Its all a matter of how you look at it. If it turns out that a lot of
64bit hardware owners are running 32bit Fedora 11...
It would be useful if anaconda displayed a info box telling people when
they were considering installing 32b Linux on systems with 32/64b CPUs
and more than about 800MB of RAM. [1]
In disk and networking the win from 64b is considerable due to much
reduced low memory fragmentation and in general there's a lot less
stuffing about with DMA. It is well worthwhile for people to install
64b Linux when that is reasonable, but as this thread has pointed out
determining 64b capabilities prior to installation is a big ask of
people unfamiliar with the intricacies of their CPU vendor's products.
Thus the requirement to let installers of 32b Linux know when a better
choice is available (but of course, not to insist upon that better
choice -- the info box should only be informational).
[1] More technically, when /proc/meminfo's LowTotal < MemTotal.
--
Glen Turner
I really don't see a great value in changing the arch yet again, this time to i686. The logic for switching to i586 was sound, and we didn't really lose any people using Fedora on both new and old hardware.
However, I do like the idea of an infobox that would show up if 32-bit Fedora is being installed on a 64-bit capable machine with sufficient RAM available.