Why would anyone use a 32-bit OS in 2012?
I’ve been browsing some mailing lists and so on (it doesn’t matter which ones) and came across the Great 32-Bit Debate afresh. The debate always starts with someone saying “I need 32-bit support” or “this doesn’t work on 32-bit systems,” and someone else raising an objection to that, saying that nobody uses 32-bit systems anymore and anyone who does is doing something wrong.
Why would anyone use a 32-bit OS in the year 2012? I can think of a few very good reasons.
- The universe isn’t wholly x86_64 yet; there’s still ARM and other non-server systems.
- Developer laptops often run 32-bit operating systems, especially when Linux is the developer’s preference, because it works better with a lot of proprietary software such as Flash and audio drivers, and generally causes a lot less user headache. This is especially relevant because Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular distributions are targeted towards 32-bit. My experience is that they just don’t work as well in 64-bit versions. Besides, if my laptop has only 4GB of RAM (I’ve never had one with more than that), there’s no benefit at all to 64-bit in any case.
- A cost-conscious person may very well spin up one of the smaller EC2 instances for lightweight jobs, and those are 32-bit. Many other cloud hosting providers follow the same pattern: getting a 64-bit instance is more expensive.
How is this relevant to MySQL? For a while some of the MySQL forks weren’t available for 32-bit systems. It reminded me that a surprising number of people will use a product in edge-case ways, and failing to serve minorities ends up excluding the majority.
There are some advantages and disadvantages of using x86_64 abi in linux in systems with 4GB or less of ram (More registers, better floating point, ect). But the downside is the increase memory usage for having the 64 bit pointers.
They are working on a new abi that keeps the good parts of it, and gets rid of the bad parts for systems with 4Gb or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI
Also, my expience has been differnet with respect to distros support of x86_64. It works really well, and has for years for just about every distro except slackware which was pretty late to add support.
I do think you do have to draw the line somewhere with regards to suppporting miniorty platforms when you have limited resources, but x86 is close enough to x86_64 that it kind of makes sense to do it.
William
24 Oct 12 at 6:36 pm
I agree with #1 and #2, because I’ve run Linux as my primary desktop OS for a long time and have run into better 32bit support for proprietary software as you mentioned. Also, I run Ubuntu on my netbook and it has a 32 bit processor.
But regarding #3, Amazon now supports 64bit across the board – http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/ec2-updates-new-instance-64-bit-bit-ubiquity-ssh-client.html
AltJ
24 Oct 12 at 10:33 pm
Of note, AWS now offers 64-bit options of all its sizes … but that only happened maybe 6 months ago or so.
Abe
25 Oct 12 at 1:12 am
@William
“and gets rid of the bad parts for systems with 4Gb or less”
wouldn’t that actually be “for processes that don’t need a 2/3/4GB+ address space”?
As far as i understood X32_ABI can be used on a per-process base on a x86_64 OS …
hartmut
25 Oct 12 at 5:51 am
A mid-range phone will have 1GB RAM and a high end one will have 2GB. In 12 months or so, this will no doubt double.
This basically says that in 12 months or so, ARM will be 64bit on high end phones and tablets.
I struggle to think about coping with only 4GB of memory in a laptop… that’s about what a web browser uses these days.
Stewart Smith
25 Oct 12 at 8:25 pm
Finally someone with some sense in head ! This is the obvious explanation to why 32-bit is used.
Jouni "rautamiekka" Järvinen
26 Oct 12 at 10:10 am
My laptop runs great on 4GB, with about 1GB free, and I’m doing a lot more than using a browser. But then again, I’m not using Firefox or Gnome 3, so I may not have the problems you have. The biggest process I am running has rsize of 232M right now, and most of that is shared.
I frankly don’t expect to need more than 4GB of RAM for the foreseeable future. My computing memory usage has stayed about the same (if we omit Firefox, OpenOffice, and Gnome 3) for many years. I am not sure there is a reason that future software automatically has to be more bloated than present software. That seems especially true in mobile devices, where more RAM means more power draw and there’s a lot of effort invested in efficiency. The common wisdom that today’s programmers are careless with memory and CPU may not be universally true.
Xaprb
26 Oct 12 at 10:10 am
cos 3+2=2+0+1+2
TMP
26 Oct 12 at 1:06 pm