cesman - read your announcement of 32-bit only for 8.0 and was wondering if you and the dev team considered the amount of older PCs (x86 only) that are out there in the user base? Since mythtv has such a low resource requirement (CPU and memory), do you think that 64-bit only packages are really value-added when you consider the amount of systems you will exclude in the process?

For example, how many systems out there really need more than 1 G of memory to run a mythbox? I have several older AMD-based frontends that run Arch i686 and that couldn't run x86_64.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

If you feel that strongly about 32-bit, please step up and lend a hand. As cesman stated we are a small (read: 4 person) dev team with lots of other goings on. 64-bit is the future (heck, present) of computing. Without the personnel resources to devote to maintaining multiple architechures, it makes perfect sense, IMO. With support for R7 continuing for the next 18-24 months, that will give users plenty of time to upgrade hardware if they choose to.

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

I love to help out, but have no free time to do it. I totally agree with your statement about the present and future of computing, but for the specific application of LH, [mythtv] I just don't see the strategic advantage of moving to a 64-bit distro. The main reason to go from i686 --> x86_64 is to address >4 gig of RAM which is just overkill and/or a waste for a mythtv-centric distro like LH.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

what chips are 32bit anymore? I bought into the 64bit AMD chips before XP SP2 came out. that chip is so outdated that it could not play HD.

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My System

Normally i'm all for new h/w and let's not bother supporting the old stuff but there is a key difference here that graysky points out: many (probably most) MythTV h/w is old, that's the beauty of Myth (esp. with VDPAU). My 3 machines are all Pentium 4s with PCI 8400GS cards - they probably date from 2003 & they work great. What does 64-bit really buy us? Ability to use more RAM? What else? I assume there's more that I'm missing. LinHES the appliance shouldn't need much RAM...

I work for a major (read MAJOR) Silicon Valley company. Interestingly we are still XP 32-bit as standard despite running it on 64-bit h/w. We are just now starting to switch to Win 7. I don't hear anyone ever asking about Win 7/64-bit or wanting it.

Still, I'm not complaining, gives me an excuse to buy some new gear And I'm very excited to see R7 being released, thanks to everyone who worked on this, I look fwd to playing with it soon I hope...

Paul

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Paul O'Flynn

My frontends run AMD Athlon XP-based systems. HD is via nvidia cards that do it via VDPAU.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

I am curious as well as to what is driving the move to 64 bit. I do agree the dev team should only focus on one or the other.

It is not a memory issue as pretty much all distros use PAE now to exceed 4GB without performance impact. My own main server runs 8GB on a 32 bit kernel just fine.

If I were to guess the main driver is primarily video encoding/transcoding. A 64 bit machine should execute these much more efficiently.

The larger issue for 64 bit in Linux has been the availability of packages that properly compile and execute on 64 bit. For example Flash has been an issue in the past but I don't know if it is any more.

It was a group decision. We simply don't have enough bandwidth to support 32 and 64 bit. 32bit package will be upgrade for the next 24 months. Should bandwidth increase, we could very well produce 32 bit R8+.