JDK 64bit

[scorp123]

Why 64 bit? Because we can =)

You misunderstood the question, obviously. Only few people will _really_ ever make use of the full potential 64-bit offers; for the rest 32-bit + PAE would be more than enough.

I can ask you the same question the other way, why 32 bit?

I have to work with commercial apps that only exist for 32-bit Linux as far as their Linux versions is concerned. The only 64-bit versions of these apps that exist are for commercial UNIX OS'es. And I don't feel like running a HP-UX machine or having Solaris 10 on my boxes when a 32-bit Linux with PAE could do the job just as well.

(or why not 16 bit?)

As a matter of fact I have some ancient Sun boxes here, I think they are 16-bit But it's highly unlikely that any modern OS would boot on those things

And don't accuse Sun

But I do Because I know and because I can

OpenJDK is official Sun project, so they provide version that you can install on 64 bit system.

Yeah great: a limited version that is. A version which is not 100% compatible to their closed-source "Sun Jave 6" release; hence many apps I happen to know will not work with OpenJDK.

And also OpenJDK is 100% compatible with java specification.

See here and answer my question there:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5995226

So you have OpenJDK and a 64-bit Linux? Fine then, could you then please try out something for me? Go to this URL from Sun's web site and try if you can login and if you can open any apps:
https://sgddemo.sun.com/

For the record, that's just one of the commercial apps that I mentioned above and it's from Sun too ... and it's heavily Java based:

Sun Secure Global Desktop
http://www.sun.com/software/products/sgd/index.jsp

And the funny thing is that it would not work with OpenJDK (which according to you is sponsored by Sun too?) when I tried.

But maybe things have changed? So please: can you please go to that URL and try it out? I know that it works perfectly with Sun's Java (on 32-bit) .... But does it work too with OpenJDK and 64-bit? It did not when I tried a few weeks ago. But maybe there was an update? Can you try please and tell me?

[ggaaron]

You misunderstood the question, obviously. Only few people will _really_ ever make use of the full potential 64-bit offers; for the rest 32-bit + PAE would be more than enough.

Anyone that would have a need for PAE would use 64bit's potential, from what you say it has a huge performance impact. But I will agree with you that boxes with less than 4GB of memory will probably not use much of 64bit advantages and certainly will hit higher memory usage disadvantage.

Yeah great: a limited version that is. A version which is not 100% compatible to their closed-source "Sun Jave 6" release; hence many apps I happen to know will not work with OpenJDK.

Sun released all the source code for their JDK they could and the rest was developed as icedtea project and this is what Ubuntu calls OpenJDK. It's not a limited version for sure, in fact it has even come upgrades (zero, shark). The problem may be 64bit browser plugin that doesn't work always from what I can tell. Because of issues with browser plugin I can't even run java test application, so your site doesn't work too, but if you have some not proprietary applications that I could download and test then give me a link.

[scorp123]

so your site doesn't work too

For me and most users this is precisely all that counts. It does not work. And there are more examples where OpenJDK on 64-bit fails miserably. So I have to use Sun's original Java 6 SDK, I have to use their web-browser plugin, I have to use 32-bit. And if I have more than 4 GB RAM I have to use 32-bit + PAE. And the performance hit is not as dramatic as it might sound, it's negligible.

I am not saying "64-bit is bad" or something like that .... it's just that contrary to some of the claims one can read around the forums here it's not as "troublefree" as some people claim. What I am saying is "if you run into too much trouble: consider using 32-bit Linux with PAE". That's all.

[ggaaron]

For me and most users this is precisely all that counts. It does not work.

Unfortunately that is what most people are only interested about=(
For me it is trouble free - everything works as it would with 32bit.

[scorp123]

For me it is trouble free - everything works as it would with 32bit.

Lucky you. If I want all the stuff to work I am either stuck with 32-bit Linux and PAE (which basically is a "workaround") or I'd have to use a commercial UNIX variant ... they are tip top as server OS but as desktop OS they kinda suck

[ggaaron]

Solaris is going more desktop friendly. There should be a new release somewhere this month, I'm eager to see it, and it's free in both senses of the word.

[scorp123]

Solaris is going more desktop friendly.

I know. But the current "Solaris Express" releases (= the future Solaris 11) are not that super-duper stable. It's like a lottery ... build 98 was solid, build 99 was a pile of crap, build 100 was better but still shaky, build 101 looks pretty solid again ...

And OpenSolaris 2008.05 is nice, looks and feels like a Linux distro ... but some of the stuff I work with doesn't like OpenSolaris, e.g. there are too many things from Solaris missing .... so it's not an alternative for me either.

There should be a new release somewhere this month

Solaris 10 Update 6 got released end of October; but it's still Solaris 10. So I assume you can't mean that? Solaris "Express" gets released every Friday or so. The DVD releases are now at build 103 whereas the CD release is still at build 98.

[ggaaron]

I've meant opensolaris. I've tired it before an as you've said - things were missing and others were not working, I hope it will be better (at least usable) this time.

[scorp123]

I've meant opensolaris.

Yes, OpenSolaris 2008.11 should be out now. Now that they finally have a package manager too I will try if I can upgrade my experimental 2008.05 installation to 2008.11 .... the GUI front-end pretty much looks and feels like Synaptic. Sometimes I wish they'd integrate that into their commercial Solaris 10 releases, that would be nice.

I guess we stop here, we're way too off-topic

[scorp123]

Finally!!!

Sun has finally released a 64-bit Java Plugin
https://jdk6.dev.java.net/6uNea.html