[mythtv-users] Gentoo 64bit and MythTV completely compatible?

devsk funtoos at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 27 21:09:46 UTC 2007


a couple of months ago I had completely identical (same h/w, same packages, same cflags, same use flags etc.) x86 and amd64 gentoo installs on my machine in triple boot setup with xp. And during mencoder encoding x264, I found that x86_64 was about 15-20% faster than x86.

cons are that the 32-bit plugins will work only with <pkg>-bin packages, and a freshly booted x86_64 install eats up more RAM than freshly booted
x86 does, and programs in general will appear bigger in 'top'. But gentoo makes it very easy to manage the 32-bit thing.

so, if you have plenty of RAM, can work with 32-bit plugin intricacies and have use for video encoding etc., amd64 may be a good idea. btw, I removed 32-bit install after few months of settling down with amd64 and have no issues with it now.

-devsk

----- Original Message ----
From: Rod Smith <mythtv at rodsbooks.com>
To: Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2007 11:14:50 AM
Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Gentoo 64bit and MythTV completely compatible?

On Saturday 27 January 2007 13:17, Richard Freeman wrote:
> John Drescher wrote:
> >> Is anyone successfully running gentoo 64bit from the gentoo
> >> repositories?
>
> Been running myth for the better part of year now on 64-bit gentoo with
> no real issues.

When I researched distributions and software for my recent MythTV 
installation, I ran across some posts from ~2 years ago suggesting that 
certain operations (such as transcoding, IIRC) relied on code that had been 
optimized for 32-bit x86, and that such code would run much slower on a full 
64-bit installation. I interpreted this to mean that the software included 
inline 32-bit x86 assembly instructions for x86 platforms, but that on 
x86_64, the compiler would revert to slower C code. I found this quite 
believable because I've run across similar things in the past in other 
software (Ghostscript, IIRC, for one). Unfortunately, I didn't save the 
reference URLs for these discussions, and they tended to be scarce on 
details, so I can't provide anything more specific.

Have such inefficiencies in the 64-bit implementations of these tools been 
eliminated in the intervening time? I'm currently running a 32-bit Ubuntu 
installation on my 64-bit-capable Celeron D system, but if there won't be any 
speed hit to running a 64-bit OS, I'll consider using one when it comes time 
to do software upgrades. Although the speed benefits are small (about 5-20% 
for most programs), x86_64 code can be a little faster than x86 code on the 
same CPU, all other things being equal.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com
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