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Miyu
n00b
Joined: 01 May 2004
Posts: 2
Location: Germany
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 Posted: Sat May 01, 2004 7:24 pm Post subject: 32 or 64 bit Gentoo environment on amd64? |
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I have a Athlon64 3200 and i want to install Gentoo, hardware should work following my tests ...
Some Questions:
1. I was reading about a chroot'ed 32 bit environment. Is that necessary and for what exactly? The description in the technotes was a little fuzy.
2. Is there any way to run wine on a 64 bit Gentoo? I need it badly for a specific program.
3. Are there any problems running a 32bit build instead of the 64bit one and how big are the speed drawacks roughly? |
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sarah_t_s
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Joined: 27 Apr 2004
Posts: 21
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| Posted: Sat May 01, 2004 9:20 pm Post subject: Re: 32 or 64 bit Gentoo environment on amd64? |
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| Miyu wrote: | I have a Athlon64 3200 and i want to install Gentoo, hardware should work following my tests ...
Some Questions:
1. I was reading about a chroot'ed 32 bit environment. Is that necessary and for what exactly? The description in the technotes was a little fuzy.
2. Is there any way to run wine on a 64 bit Gentoo? I need it badly for a specific program.
3. Are there any problems running a 32bit build instead of the 64bit one and how big are the speed drawacks roughly? |
I'm a n00b here myself, but hey I'll do my best to help 
1. Well as far as I can tell this is similar to what you do during a LiveCD install. when you go <command I just forgot> /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash except your doing it with directories on your HDD.
2. No. I don't fully understand the deep voodoo reasons, but... it's the Win32API and it's a 64bit system which is different is a lot of ways so I guess the momment it uses a pointer bam. Having said all that it seems people have had some sucsess with WineX and using the Nvidia IA32 drivers... so that might be worth a try?
3. I'm no authority but I doubt it. Windows XP/98/2000 are 32bit and work fine. I've seen reports of people using various 32bit Linux distros (Slackware/Debian/Knoppix/et al) so I see no logical reason a 32bit gentoo system wouldn't fire up.
As for speed penalties; I don't know hard figures but my 3400 is pretty damn quick in 32bit mode, 3D Studio is fine as are every game I've thrown at it. |
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jdong
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Joined: 01 Mar 2004
Posts: 41
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| Posted: Sat May 01, 2004 9:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | I have a Athlon64 3200 and i want to install Gentoo, hardware should work following my tests ...
Some Questions:
1. I was reading about a chroot'ed 32 bit environment. Is that necessary and for what exactly? The description in the technotes was a little fuzy.
2. Is there any way to run wine on a 64 bit Gentoo? I need it badly for a specific program.
3. Are there any problems running a 32bit build instead of the 64bit one and how big are the speed drawacks roughly? |
1. Well, not really necessary... It's for running a pure 32-bit environment inside your 64-bit environment. It wastes space, and doesn't offer many benefits at all.
2. Yes, go to winehq.com, and download a BINARY from there (no source -- building it is a PAIN)
3. No, there's some speed drawback, so don't go 32-bit unless necessary (i.e. wine, openoffice).
WORD OF CAUTION -- You may read about a -m32 flag that allows gcc to build in 32-bit mode. DO NOT specify it as a portage CFLAG, and then emerge with the m32 flag -- It can screw up portage... (not fun stuff) |
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p-Lo
n00b
Joined: 10 Mar 2004
Posts: 41
Location: Lewes, Delaware (US)
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| Posted: Sun May 02, 2004 1:09 am Post subject: |
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Actually, 32-bit code runs plenty fast on amd64 (you would just use the x86 livecd and treat it as an x86 system). Until good drivers are made for amd64 and compilers can fully take advantage of amd64, in some cases 32 bit actually ends up being faster than 64 bit on amd64. Also, 32 bit on amd 64 is still a whole lot faster than 32 bit on athlon xp, depending on what procs you are comparing.
A chroot environment allows you to enter a 32-bit evironment in linux and run many 32 bit programs just as if you had installed the entire system 32 bit - but directly from your 64 bit kernel, so you can quickely and easily switch back to your 64 bit environment.
I would not attempt to run wine on a native 64-bit install, but I'm no expert in that area.
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srs5694
Guru
Joined: 08 Mar 2004
Posts: 434
Location: Woonsocket, RI
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| Posted: Sun May 02, 2004 1:48 pm Post subject: Re: 32 or 64 bit Gentoo environment on amd64? |
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| Miyu wrote: | | 1. I was reading about a chroot'ed 32 bit environment. Is that necessary and for what exactly? The description in the technotes was a little fuzy. |
The main purpose is to enable you to more easily compile 32-bit programs. You basically set up an entire 32-bit installation, so you've got 32-bit development tools, libraries, configuration files, etc., and they won't interfere with your main 64-bit environment. It's not necessary for running typical 32-bit programs, which you can run using compatibility libraries without doing a chroot. You must typically obtain precompiled 32-bit binaries when running without a chroot environment, though.
At least, that's my understanding; I've not set up a 32-bit chroot environment, although my AMD64 system dual-boots between five 64-bit and two 32-bit Linux distributions.
| Quote: | | 2. Is there any way to run wine on a 64 bit Gentoo? I need it badly for a specific program. |
Previous responses are 1 yea and 2 nay. The nays are wrong. As jdong says, you need a binary WINE build to make it work. (I built one in Fedora Core 32-bit, but a prebuilt binary tarball or whatever should work as well.) Depending on the platform for which it was intended, you might also need to copy some libraries over. Once it's installed properly, though, it should work. Mine certainly does. Mainly I run MS Word (yuck, but often necessary for me), but I've run a few other programs, too. I'd expect that old 16-bit programs wouldn't run (as I understand it, the AMD64 supports 16- and 32-bit execution or 32- and 64-bit, but not all three simultaneously). 32-bit programs should run as well as they do under a 32-bit distribution.
| Quote: | | 3. Are there any problems running a 32bit build instead of the 64bit one and how big are the speed drawacks roughly? |
As I say, I've got two 32-bit Linux distributions (Fedora Core and Mandrake) installed on my Athlon 64. I've not tried installing a 32-bit Gentoo, but I don't see why it wouldn't install.
As to speed, I've run some benchmarks in my various distributions, and I've found that 64-bit gives a speed boost of 10-30% in most CPU-intensive programs (gzip, bzip2, oggenc, etc.), with 15% being fairly typical. This speed improvement is obviously much less for programs that are more memory- or disk-intensive. When I ran nbench, it showed a very big (35%) improvement in integer operations, a 3% improvement for memory operations, and a 2% drop in floating-point operations for 64-bit. I didn't experiment much with compiler options, though; it's possible that the fp drop could be overcome by changing them. Of course, few programs are as integer-intensive as the nbench integer suite, so actual results are likely to be less dramatic, as my tests with real-world programs suggest.
These tests all used GCC 3.3.x. The new 3.4 version of GCC is reputed to give another ~10% speed boost to AMD64, but I don't know what it does for x86. I've not actually tried using GCC 3.4, so I can't comment on it from personal experience, either. |
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blueworm
l33t
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 962
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| Posted: Sun May 02, 2004 3:58 pm Post subject: |
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I agree with the 2 previous posts.
I run booth gentoo 32bit and 64 bit.
The most noticable speed differrences are noticed when compilling.
Other than that in normal desktop operation there is no obvious speed differrence.
I still use the 32bit version more than anything. And leave 64 bit for experimentation.
As a gamer I am still paciently waiting for some 64 bit nvidia drivers with 32 bit library compatibility. At present the only commercial games that run flawlwessly in 64 bit are ut2004 and quake2.
Enemy-territory runs but with mild texture problems.
quake3 runs with extreme texture problems. |
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Gelfling
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 106
Location: Avenel, NJ
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| Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2004 11:43 pm Post subject: |
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Which 32-bit version of Gentoo were you able to install? I want to install the 32-bit version of Gentoo on my AMD64 but I only found an iso for x86. Is there a 2004.1 iso for athlon-xp? I grabbed the x86 iso of 2004.1 but I can't get it to see my harddrives connected to the VIA SATA connectors. I tried the 64-bit version and it was nice but there's still some things I found annoying and it hampered the full use of my machine. I really want to use my ATI 9800 XT in this machine and as of yet there's no 64-bit drivers available. I've tried Gentoo 2004.1 and Mandrake 10, both failed dismally. Any help???
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blueworm
l33t
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 962
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| Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 5:30 am Post subject: |
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Just use the regular 2004.0 or 2004.1 stage 1 or an athlonXP stage2 or 3.
NOTE: you must boot the SMP kernel this way you are booting a 2.6 kernel wich will recognize your SATA drives. |
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paulisdead
Guru
Joined: 10 Apr 2002
Posts: 510
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 7:39 am Post subject: |
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i'm a little confused about how one exactly uses multilib. Would one just do CFLAGS="-m32" emerge nameofapp? I already have gcc built with the multilib use variable. And could you say, install xine as 32bit this way, and point it to the win32codecs and realplayer codecs from another install and have that work without needing to do the whole chroot thing just to play a video? I've got chroot working already for it.
Some of the things I've had problems with, aside from games and videos, is dvd::rip, for some reason it just stops encoding. I haven't had much time to look at it, though, but it works fine in the chroot. Eterm's transparency doesn't seem to work right for me either, but xchat and aterm's transparency works fine, no biggy I just switched to aterm. I've also got that firefox bug where it crashes upon entering text, but that only seems to happen to me if I open something in a new tab and try to enter text into it. I can enter all the text I want from the tabs that have been opened at startup, kinda weird.
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Gelfling
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 106
Location: Avenel, NJ
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| Posted: Sat Jun 12, 2004 2:03 am Post subject: |
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blueworm, I tried your suggestion but I got as far as a blank screen. Both smp and smp-nofb failed to properly boot on my system. In one case I got a splashscreen that was garbled and unusable. I guess I'll just have to replace my 9800XT with my Nvidia GeForce 5900XT and re-try running in a 64-bit environment. I would prefer to run 32-bit, I'm open to any other suggestions...
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Phanbox64: MSI K8N Neo2, AMD Athlon64 3500+, ATI Radeon 9800XT, Corsair TwinX1024-3200C2 1024MB SDRAM, 2 WD 74GB Raptors & 120GB SATA HD, Audigy2 ZS, Plextor PX-708A DVD-/+RW, Pioneer DVD-106S DVD-ROM, CoolerMaster WaveMaster Case |
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Gelfling
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 106
Location: Avenel, NJ
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| Posted: Wed Jun 16, 2004 11:27 pm Post subject: |
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Just as a test, I d/l'ed Fedora Core 2 x86 (32-bit) version and installed it and I found that I ran into the same problems I had with Gentoo's 64-bit install. One thing I did like was how easy setting up software raid 0 in Fedora Core's installer was.
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Phanbox64: MSI K8N Neo2, AMD Athlon64 3500+, ATI Radeon 9800XT, Corsair TwinX1024-3200C2 1024MB SDRAM, 2 WD 74GB Raptors & 120GB SATA HD, Audigy2 ZS, Plextor PX-708A DVD-/+RW, Pioneer DVD-106S DVD-ROM, CoolerMaster WaveMaster Case |
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kalisphoenix
Apprentice
Joined: 28 Sep 2003
Posts: 211
Location: Ohio
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| Posted: Wed Jul 21, 2004 3:51 am Post subject: |
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I've been having a little bit of trouble with the chroot concept myself. I admit that I haven't done shit programming since, oh, about 12 years ago. I was in the sixth grade learning to use CIRCLE and LINE in QBASIC.
So forgive me for being a n00b.
Imagine:
1. I'm running an AMD64 w/ GCC 3.4.1 and a 2.6.7 kernel.
2. I make a li'l chroot -- inside it is all i686, maybe athlon or some similar -march that isn't too offensive. I emerge GCC 3.3.3 and:
3. build myself a nice little package, say, Firefox: <emerge --buildpkg firefox>
4. copy the tar.bz2 from /harmless_lil_chroot/usr/portage/packages to the host's /usr/portage/packages
5. <emerge -K> that.
So, is that the idea behind this? I apologize if this is ridiculously obvious or it ridiculously obviously won't work, but I wasn't sure I quite grasped the essence of the technotes. |
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Gentoo on AMD64
