Re: 64 bit software

From: Mark Bole <makbo_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 14:16:31 GMT
Message-ID: <3XFZc.14544$sx4.3166@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com>

Dusan Bolek wrote:

> Mark Bole <makbo_at_pacbell.net> wrote in message news:<KRwZc.14393$9%.832_at_newssvr27.news.prodigy.com>...
>

>>I tried 64-bit when I tested upgrades to 9i under Solaris 8.  The basic 
>>installs and such worked fine, but when 3rd-party clients (Java, Perl) 
>>need to be re-linked, that's when the troubles started.  I retreated to 
>>32-bit.

>
>
> Can you elaborate more on this? We're using only 64-bit Oracle here
> (well, some old 32bit 8.0.5s still hanging around) and all transitions
> were transparent. Client side should not be affected at all. Are
> mentioned clients on the same server? Or are they on an application
> server transferred to 64bit OS?
>
> --
> Dusan Bolek
> http://www.db-support.com
>

[...]

My elaboration boils down to this: it was a too much work for too little benefit.

On the too little benefit side, I really do encourage people to do some further research. I think the hype around Playstation and Nintendo moving from 16-bit to 32-bit many years back started a false impression that more bits are always better.

Solaris 8 itself, even with 64-bit kernel, still has all the system utilities compiled as 32-bit, only those that directly interact with the kernel or system time are 64-bit.

Start with this very good article:
"The myths and realities of 64-bit computing" http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=112 (more links below)

On the "too much work" side, I had to recompile Perl 5.8 to 64-bit, not too bad. But then every Perl module, starting with DBD::Oracle, that included C source code had to be recompiled as well. Some worked OK, others I had to start mucking around in the source and casting things into t_time32 datatypes (working from memory here, probably have the exact name wrong). Mostly I just found through testing that I was getting Solaris errors along the lines of "wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64" too often. I fixed as many as I could but got tired of it eventually.

Also, to get 64-bit support for Java SDK required version 1.4.2, which we were not ready to upgrade to at the time. (over a year ago).

Sample error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:

/opt/home/oracle/product/9.2.0/lib/libocijdbc9.so: ld.so.1: 
/bin/../java/bin/../bin/sparc/native_threads/java: fatal: 
/opt/home/oracle/product/9.2.0/lib/libocijdbc9.so: wrong ELF class: 

ELFCLASS64 More links for research:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=64-bit+slower+32-bit

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/faqs/64bit.html#top
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/perl5-porters/536846
http://ac-archive.sourceforge.net/largefile/solaris.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.64bit
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-sparc/2002-Feb/0126.html
http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/08/0708chips.html
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/install-solaris-64.html

--Mark Bole Received on Thu Sep 02 2004 - 09:16:31 CDT