How stable is Gentoo Linux 64bit ?

d2_racing · Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2009 2:03 pm Post subject:

Also, the ~arch is pretty active too, since a lot of dev and other are running with that arch.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2009 2:13 pm Post subject:

I've not had any problems over the last year with my amd64 system

Stable as can be.
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regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

I've had amd64 for about 1.5years. It's been almost stable except for Qt4 which has had some odd bugs that pop up and disappear every now and then.

Yamakuzure · Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2009 8:20 am Post subject:

Mind, my machine at home has 4GB Ram and will be extended to 8GB next month. Even my parents have 4GB, so it might be a good idea to be careful about statements what "others" have at home.

On the other hand we have alot of DELL Servers at work with excessive database loads (some dbs have hundreds of GB sized tables) and are still using Debian-32bit with mysql 4.1.

However, people seem to keep forgetting that we do not have 2003 anymore. Staying excessively on x86 because "we don't need 64bit" is the same what many companies did with staying on old 16bit Windows 3.1(1) in the nineties.

just my 2 (euro) cents.

PS Running "almost only" stable amd64 on my company laptop since august 2008 and "alot unstable" amd64 on my home desktop since april 2009 (with flawlessly working nvidia-drivers, btw) and didn't have a single problem since now.

PPS For xorg try "nvidia-xconfig", it works pretty well for me.
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na641 · Posted: Wed Jul 22, 2009 1:10 pm Post subject:

have been using amd64 gentoo since it was introduced. it's very stable and even the long running desktop issues (flash/java/etc.) have been rectified. I personally run ~ simply because its not 'unstable' at all. in actuality, id call it 'stable' and standard amd64 as 'stagnant'. Original question, how stable? very.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Interesting sideline...

My main machine, which is a K8 which was running x86, is now getting the amd64 side reinstalled, replacing the old 2007 installation. The immediate impetus for this action was a stupid mistake on my part. I was reading another article on Slashdot about backup, which I'm not good enough at. I've been toying on and off with doing something about my /etc directories on my various machines, and not knowing the best thing has been the enemy of doing something at all. So I finally set up some rsync space on the raid-1 volume on my server, and built a structure giving each machine an rsync target for its /etc. I then grabbed the line that I use to keep the raid-1 space on my backup server synchronized with the main server, and used it to rsync my /etc to the backup space.

I had the command line backwards. Instead of syncing /etc up to the empty space on the server, I synced the empty space on the server down to /etc. It's dead, Jim.

A bit of searching online indicates that ext3 is a sonofagun to undelete. It can be done - there's a program called "ext3grep" in portage. In fact, after I realized what I had done, I "sync ; sync ; sync"ed and shut the power off to the machine. I have an odd partition setup, so that my root is nearly-entirely-write, and most read-write activity is on /var and /home, and a set of bind-mounts to make it that way. I have about as benign a situation for undelete of /etc as can exist. But that also needs a stable platform to start the undelete, and I didn't quickly find a LiveCD that I liked with ext3grep installed.

In this case, the simplest way to a stable platform is to redo the amd64 install. It's going pretty well so far. Mythtv just failed because of USE flag issues on dependent packages. I've tweaked /etc/portage/package.use, and find that "emerge -atuvDN world" shows quite a few changes because of the install of sqlite and mysql, so that's running now. (Currently at qt-3, to be precise.)

There's so little difference to me between a "stable platform" and a complete install that right now I'm simply going for the latter. It's mostly waiting for compilation, and right now it's compiling while I'm doing other things that need to be done. Besides, the secondary deskside machine is now up in the study. My daughter is home from college, and her machine had bumped the secondary machine from it's normal niche. So this is happening at about as benign a time as possible.

The big question left is, once the amd64 install is complete, how motivated will I be to recover the /etc on the x86 install? (I may wnat to try, just for the practice/learning.)
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Yamakuzure · Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2009 1:07 pm Post subject:

keet · Guru Joined: 09 Sep 2008 Posts: 571

Dominique_71 · Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2009 4:21 pm Post subject:

About the speed difference between 32 and 64 bits, you will notice nothing in most cases on windows because they made the choice to use the LLP64 (long long pointer 64) coding model, when all other 64 bits OS are using LP64 (long pointer 64). LP64 implies that more data types can use the 64bits capability of the processor. Porting an application from 32 to 64 bits is harder with LP64, but it will benefit much more of the speed advantage of a 64 bits processor.

For now, I am using a phenom 9600 with 8 GB ram and Nvidia graphics. It is my first amd machine and I find it wonderful: both the speed and the stability are terrific. amd64 arch at the beginning, ~amd64 from a few months ago. /etc/portage/packages.keywords was becoming so big that it was much simpler to switch to ~amd64 anyway.

The stability is so good that I usually never stop the programs I am using the most. I stop them when I stop the machine.

Edit:
I know by personal experience than your CFLAGS will have a very big impact on the stability. It is why I use only safe CFLAGS:

XQYZ · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 231 Location: Europe

Running ~amd64. It's rock solid as far as I can tell. The stable branch is ancient compared to it and there aren't too many issues with running the newest software.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Incidentally, my former 32-bit (formerly 64-bit before that) main system is back as 64-bit. It's still got a few rough edges - primarily a few problems with CUPS/hplip. But other than that, it's been rock solid.

Much more important, my wife has been happy with it. Firefox works raliably with her highly-favored Glowy-Green theme, and flash stuff like YouTube, Daily Show, etc all work.

I don't know how hard I'm going to try to recover the 32-bit install, at this point. Right now I'm more likely to scavenge the space.
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Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

TBH, the speed difference between 64 and 32-bit is very small (And can go both ways!) EXCEPT when dealing with data-types larger than 32-bit or really really big data sets (Like giant databases!)

You'd get a bigger speed increase by buying a faster CPU or maybe even tweaking CFLAGS than going from 32 to 64 for the majority of applications.

The Phoronix benchmark seems to show this (Speed differences not that much different except with specific apps which match the above criteria), although I am slightly suspicious of the test as the 64-bit Ubuntu was SLOWER than the 32-bit one for the GnuPG test; Our own tests with OpenSSL show a near-3x speedup for 64-bit compared to 32-bit (Which seems in-line with their tests), and since GnuPG is also a crypto program that deals with large numbers I'd have expected it to demolish the 32-bit version in a similar fashion.

ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

Dominique_71 · Posted: Wed Jul 29, 2009 6:16 pm Post subject:

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509