These days, just about every major distribution (with the notable exception of Slackware) is offering an AMD64 port of their principal product. This is mainly in anticipation of increased popularity of the 64-bit processors in the future and to gain experience in solving challenges that exist while developing a distribution that would be not only considerably faster than its x86 counterpart, but also equally usable – both on servers and workstations. In the upcoming series we will look at how different distributions (Linux and BSDs) handle these challenges. We will try to answer a question that some readers contemplating a new computer system might be asking: is the AMD64 processor ready to satisfy our most demanding computing tasks?
Link: lwn.net
Category:
- Linux
