On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Monty wig <montywig@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi Gurus, > > Can someone please point me the right direction on the difference between > 32bit and 64bit OS? For almost all situations, I don't see any benefit to staying with 32-bit on servers. There's apparently a narrow case for 32-bit on the desktop for some specific applications, but my laptop is 64-bit. As mentioned, the main advantage of 64-bit is address space. You can access a heckuva lot more memory without tricks than you can with 32-bit. Keep in mind that this is *per process* memory also. With a 32-bit PAE kernel, the OS can access 64G (or thereabouts, I forget the exact number) but each process is still limited to 3G. The PAE kernel is/was necessary for certain legacy applications. With 64-bits you don't have this limitation. The areas where 64-bit apps is not a good idea is on some applications, in particular Java-based apps. This hopefully will change, but running a 64-bit JVM will require lots more memory and even code changes because of how Java manages heap/memory. The common practice is to run 32-bit JVMs on top of a 64-bit OS. But to repeat, this is regarding the application rather than the kernel. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines