32/64 bits: what to choose for old laptop?

[cord]

Old laptop Dell D430. Below is the cut of CPU-Z report:

[Logicien]

Have you try to stress your processor laptop to know if it can support to compile Gento from sources? Your 2 cores are already at 58 degrees. They can become hot. In plus with only 1200 Mhz processor speed it will take long to compile I guess.

It is interesting to know if a 32 bits version of Gento have an advantage over a 64 bits. 32 bits versions of Linux distributions are going down. A lot of them only support 64 bits now.
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Paul

[NeddySeagoon]

Cord,
Your CPU is 64bit. Thats the EMT-64.
With more than 2G RAM, do a 64bit install.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[cord]

[1clue]

[Jaglover]

64-bit indeed, 2 GB is enough, although not plenty. 32-bit has been phased out by several major software providers.
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My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[cord]

[1clue]

[abduct]

It's a bit of a toss up wither to go 32 or 64 bit. I personally go with the 64 bit option when ever possible. It provides more registers to developers at the low level end of development and allows for a greater number of raw bytes of data to be transferred in a single cpu instruction. This allows for applications to be better optimized and have faster throughput under specific cases. The down side is that 64bit systems use slightly more memory due to the double the size of instructions and pointers. They can also potentially be larger in file size as well due to similar reasons.

I don't have any benchmarks personally between a native 32bit os and a native 64bit os (no virtual abstractions of 32bit code on 64bit systems) unfortunately, I would be interested if anyone has anything of the like.

To be honest if you are worried install both one at a time and run some benchmarks, but to me I'd just use 64bit. On my laptop booted fully into X with a few terminals and ssh sessions open I only use approx 100mb of ram. If you don't use X I wouldn't be surprised if you hit sub 60mb usage levels.

[ct85711]

One thing to also keep in mind, is that more projects are starting to discontinue supporting 32bit all together (not just various distros). So either way you look at it, 32bit support is dying off slowly. Now depending on your what your needs are, you may end up reinstalling as 64bit to continue updating some software.

[Ant P.]

You can install a 32-bit userspace on a 64-bit kernel. No screwing around with highmem settings that way, and more importantly you'll get patches for the Intel security nightmares of 2018.

[cwr]

I've run Gentoo pretty successfully on Thinkpad T23s (1 GHz / 1GB RAM), after
stripping down the kernel so that all modules were built in, and only those
modules which the hardware needed were installed. (There were a couple of
exceptions which had to be unloaded/loaded for hibernation.) The same generation
of Ubuntu was pretty slow, especially on boot, since it checked out every module
in sight.

I'd be inclined to use 32-bits for 2GB of RAM; 64 bits isn't going to buy you
anything, and will probably take up more space. One advantage of Gentoo
is that you get to build the system which best fits your needs.

Will

[mr-simon]

With that 2G of RAM, you're going to want to be downloading some -bin packages, rather than compiling huge things yourself (assuming you want a browser on that hardware) and as mentioned earlier some people are dropping 32-bit support in their binaries. ymmv, but you're not losing much by using 64-bit. I don't think you'll notice a performance difference.

64-bit binaries may use more RAM, although I don't think that this will be particularly significant as the binary code isn't going to be the thing that's taking up your RAM space -- it'll be the stuff that your binaries allocate space for manually, which will be the same size either way.

They'll take up more space on the disk, but again that's not really going to be the bottleneck as far as storage is concerned, unless you're really squeaky on space.

Presonally, I'd go with 64.

With 'arch', the general consensus I think is to leave make.conf alone, and if you want the fastest binaries possible then use -march=native so that gcc can work out what's best for you.

What do you plan to do with the laptop once you've installed Gentoo on it?
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"Pokey, are you drunk on love?"
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[NeddySeagoon]

cord,

Sorry about missing your 2G statement.

With over 1G of RAM, the 32 bit kernel does some extra work to use it all. That's the HIMEM setting in the kernel. At 2G it has to do more.
2G is about the tipping point to go 64 bit. Pointers use mare RAM but there is no HIMEM setting to use it all.

A long time ago (abandoned now I think) Gentoo supported a hybrid 64 bit addressing with 32 bit everything else install.
Don't go there, I think work was abandoned before it was completed but it was interesting at the time.

32 bit is a sunset install. Its not as well tested as 64 bit any more and in Gentoo, 64 bit gets more support than 32 bit and that difference will accelerate.

On balance, do a 64 bit install.

-- edit --

You can have a 32 bit userland on top of a 64 bit kernel, which avoids the HIMEM issues, however, that's its own nest of vipers as the 32 bit toolchain cannot build a 64 bit kernel.
With support for a 32 bit userland declining, that's possibly the worst of all worlds.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[cord]

Thank You All!
I think, I'll try 64.

[paluszak]

I would suggest compiling with -Os and possibly lto to reduce memory usage.

I also have an impression that older desktop systems with small CPU cache feel 'snappier' when compiled with -Os, but I did not do any tests to confirm this.

[LIsLinuxIsSogood]

Do you have access to another Gentoo host that could server as a BINHOST?

Also invest in a good fan as well if possible else leave PC in a well ventilated area

If you wanted to spend the same time but a different way you could be finding a way to make the stage4 archive with all your planned installed packages on a separate machine and then clone over to the laptop. This saves the initial compiling, but then later you will still need to figure out what to do with updated, plus this way isn't recommended without better understanding of system rescues, backup and restore procedures.

If you did have access to a build-server of sorts that was more powerful I think the good news is with 32-bit vs. 64-bit since the architecture doesn't change drastically you can (I think) do this without a cross-compiler.

[cord]

I have installed 64-bit Gentoo. Looks like it working well. But it's very hard to build some @system packages (dev-qt/qtwebkit foe example).
BINHOST is good idea, and yes, I have machine for that (Core i5 / 8 GiB RAM). But I find difficult to define CFLAGS variables - both are set to "-march=native -O2 -pipe" (no problems with CPU_FLAGS_X86, it's clear). I understand, that CPU flag sets are different...

[C5ace]

I run 64 bit Xfce in Virtualbox with 2 cores with 512KB RAM and 4GB Swap. Compiling and running Gentoo, Firefox, Thunderbird and Openoffice works fine but slow. Emerge @world takes 3 days.

[cord]

[C5ace]

[cord]

I find out script that lists me necessary flags:

[josephg]

[eccerr0r]

Besides the fact that 32-bit support is waning, I find that the 64-bit install on a Core2 machine I'm working on is hoggy on RAM and 2GB is a bit low. That is, it seems to hit swap a lot sooner than what I would expect compared to another machine with a 32-bit install with like 2GB of RAM.

Compiling -Os will at least help your text sizes, but data sizes can still be huge.

YMMV - I was planning to upgrade a Core2 Quad with 4GB RAM to 64-bit to help future proof it a bit...
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[josephg]