Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

dhave · 2008-06-28 14:55:23

This is the kind of post you write on a lazy summer Saturday.

It was inevitable that once I'd started toying with the idea of installing Arch64, I'd do it. Reason: just because I can, doggone it.

I installed Arch64 on an external hard disk attached via USB. It has similar specs to my laptop's internal hard drive, so I'm hoping it will still give me a fair performance comparison (unless IDE via USB is slower than SATA). At any rate, I didn't want to mess with my very smoothly running Arch32 installation. It's been like a member of the family (and is the family member that I actually spend the most time with, I'm embarrassed to say).

Only three hitches so far, none of them new to this forum, all of them due to my desire to use 3rd-party or 32-bit-only apps. Here's an account, for those who are interested:

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(1) Acroread -- I went so far as to install enough lib32 libraries to get it installed, but it still won't run. I'm using kpdf for the moment. I get a lot of pdf attachments for my work, though, so I may need to go with a chrooted installation soon.
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(2) CrossOver Office -- Because my employer pays for this, I've never used naked Wine, only this commercial version. I had to install yet another couple of 32-bit libraries to get it to run, but it does just fine now.
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(3) VMware Workstation -- I downloaded what is listed as the 64-bit Linux version from the VMware site. (With this VMware, I've always used the stock VMware install packages rather than the AUR packages because of some complications a year or so ago -- with the 32-bit version, that is.)

The stock installer completed fine (though I had to force the build to continue in spite of a compiler mismatch; see below), but then VMware Workstation wouldn't start. It kept wanting me to re-run vmware-config.pl. The error messages regarding module compilation seemed inconsistent; on initial install, the vmnet module built and installed "perfectly" into the running kernel. Then, after a failed launch, when I ran vmware-config.pl again, the module would not build.

Solution: Uninstall vmware using the provided uninstall script, then manually remove all traces of vmware (including /etc/vmware), and use the AUR tarballs for both vmware-workstation-modules and vmware-workstation. Rather than re-download the VMware Workstation package, I just copied over the 64-bit package from my previous attempt. So, assuming the packaged labelled by VMware as "64-bit Linux" version really is 64-bit, then the AUR tarball installed the 64-bit version. Note that you have to install vmware-workstation-modules first, as it's a dependency for vmware-workstation. Also, for some inexplicable reason, I had to run vmware-config.pl twice, but it did succeed the second time.

NOTE: About the compiler mismatch -- This is a frequently encountered warning when you install VMware. The stock Arch64 kernel was compiled with a version of gcc that is slight older than the installed version, which triggers a warning from the vmware install script. I always force a continuation, and I've never had a problem due to this. This time, since I was having a problem getting the modules to build and install properly, I did try compiling a new kernel using ABS and the stock Arch64 kernel .config. That eliminated vmware's compiler mismatch warning, but it didn't eliminate the module build failure.
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In spite of these bumps in the road, I can say that 64-bit Arch is in very good shape, as far as I can tell after maybe 15 hours of fairly extensive setup and testing. That may not sound like much, but I've been pretty steadily adding packages and apps -- including a handful of 3rd-party ones like those above.

Lazy dog that I am, I went with installing 32-bit libraries to accommodate the few 32-bit apps that I'm dependent on for my work. I think in a few weeks I'll try another clean installation and go with the 32-bit chrooted environment. As a newly converted 64-bitter, I feel a little bad about having those 32-bit libraries right out there where everybody can see them.

Performance boost? Of course! Psychological or real? I suspect the former, but that's O.K. I'm running a 64-bit O.S., and that feels good.

BTW, what I've read about slower compilation times on Arch64 as compared with Arch32 may in fact be true. I didn't time it, but when I built a custom kernel this morning, the code didn't seem to be flying across the screen the way it does under Arch32. Subjective, I know, but when you spend as much time staring at a computer screen as I do (and as I did during two or three years of using Gentoo), a subjective impression can in fact count for something. Hey, I'm an English teacher, not a statistician.

Finally, as many others have said, installing and running Arch64 doesn't seem to be any more problematic than installing and running nearly any Linux distro for desktop use. My Linux desktop experience has been that you often have to tweak and trim -- that's half the fun, and one of the main ways you learn, as we all know. So I don't think anyone with the right hardware and a willingness to work under the hood a bit needs to be afraid of Arch64. Have at it!

Last edited by dhave (2008-06-28 14:58:33)

skottish · 2008-06-29 15:06:56

dhave wrote:

Performance boost? Of course! Psychological or real? I suspect the former, but that's O.K. I'm running a 64-bit O.S., and that feels good.

Depends. 64 bit will not give any performance increase unless you need space for large memory chunks. Actually, you'll probably take a hit. Stuff like x264, FFmpeg, and mencoder will all gain here. Most games won't. Office applications... nothing either way. 64 bit comes into play when pointer allocation becomes too 'expensive'; when swapping memory becomes greater than memory allocation.

dhave wrote:

BTW, what I've read about slower compilation times on Arch64 as compared with Arch32 may in fact be true.

That's simply not true. One of the benefits of 64 bit is the compile time.

dhave · 2008-06-29 15:11:50

skottish wrote:

dhave wrote:
BTW, what I've read about slower compilation times on Arch64 as compared with Arch32 may in fact be true.
That's simply not true. One of the benefits of 64 bit is the compile time.

That's what I would have thought, too, so I was surprised to read some accounts of slower compilation times under 64-bit Linux; I'll look for the sites to confirm my memory. As I say, my response was subjective -- as most of my "review" was -- but now I've done two kernel compiles under Arch64 and, again, it seems slower. I promise to set a stopwatch the next time I do a long build and see if I can put some numbers to my feelings.

dhave · 2008-06-29 15:28:22

O.K., I think this is where I read about slower compile times under 64-bit Linux as compared to 32-bit (Gentoo 64 and not Arch64, but the comparison should still be relevant):

(from http://www.linux.com/articles/114024)

X.org compile time
You do a lot of compiling on a Gentoo Linux system, and the same can be said of FreeBSD and other operating systems that are source-based or have a Ports-like infrastructure. To test compiler speed, I ran emerge --fetchonly xorg-x11, which retrieves all of the X.org source code (a total of nine files). When it finished, I ran time emerge xorg-x11 and recorded the compile time. The first number in the table is the total time the compile took to complete; the second number is the time the entire build took to execute; and the third number is the time consumed by system overhead during the compilation procedure.
32-bit    64-bit
26min 39sec real    32min 16sec real
21min 39sec user    22min 7sec user
4min 10sec system 9min 23sec system
The 32-bit system compiled X.org faster than its 64-bit counterpart. The real time-killer looks like system overhead. Both systems used GCC 3.4.3-r1 and Linux kernel 2.6.11-gentoo-r7. Again, I don't know if any single factor is to blame, or if there are several contributors to the inferior 64-bit performance.

skottish · 2008-06-29 15:33:36

No offense here, but if the writer is telling us that compiling the same piece of software on the same machine with different architectures took something like 220% longer... bull shit. There's something wrong with that set up.

dhave · 2008-06-29 15:48:59

skottish wrote:

No offense here, but if the writer is telling us that compiling the same piece of software on the same machine with different architectures took something like 220% longer... bull shit. There's something wrong with that set up.

Could be; I don't know. At any rate, I've currently got what amounts to a dual-boot 64-bit / 32-bit Arch system, with similar hard drive specs (except for the interface -- ATA133 via USB for the 64-bit installation and internal SATA for the 32-bit installation). So I may be able to do a fair comparison of build-times. I'll try it in the next day or so and see what happens. Based on my experience with distributed compilation under Gentoo (shared by two 32-bit machines), I would have thought this is one area where 64-bit would have a clear advantage.

Surely there are other comparisons out there. Anybody got a link?

Last edited by dhave (2008-06-29 15:52:26)

skottish · 2008-06-29 15:57:09

This won't answer your question directly, but it does do a pretty good job at the 64 bit vs 32 bit question:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

dhave · 2008-06-29 15:59:53

@skottish: As I read throught the comments to the article I cited a few posts above, I see some serious questions raised about the "benchmarks" -- primarily having to do with the reviewer's having used 32-bit flags with his 64-bit test run. So maybe there's good reason to doubt the results.

dhave · 2008-06-29 16:09:21

skottish wrote:

This won't answer your question directly, but it does do a pretty good job at the 64 bit vs 32 bit question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

Yikes! EYAWTKA 64-bit BWATA!

Arch Linux

#1 2008-06-28 14:55:23

Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#2 2008-06-29 15:06:56

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#3 2008-06-29 15:11:50

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#4 2008-06-29 15:28:22

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#5 2008-06-29 15:33:36

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#6 2008-06-29 15:48:59

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#7 2008-06-29 15:57:09

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#8 2008-06-29 15:59:53

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

#9 2008-06-29 16:09:21

Re: Jumped off the fence, landed on my feet, still standing ...

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