Since there has been much talk about Bluewhite64 and Slamd64, and how they relate to the lack of an official 64-bit Slackware, conducting this poll should give new insights to some issues.

You have to look hard to by a pure 32 bit CPU nowadays and soon you won't find any. Regardless of the benefits of 64 bit, that's where the technology is headed. It doesn't make sense for Slackware, the world's BEST LINUX DISTRO to lag behind too long. I run Slackware and Slamd64. I would prefer not to have to maintain two seperate OS. I also think Pat should drop i486 compatability.

On the other hand, Slamd64 is a bright spot and shows what Slackware could do. Fred is a brilliant and personable developer and distro maintainer. I have no idea how they would handle things now that Pat hasn't made any major statements or actions on the 64 bit issue and Slamd64 is perfectly positioned to go ahead. Nobody would know the difference if Pat said he was going to start shipping a multilib distro and just used what Fred has done.

Except of course the biggest growing market sector at present, intel atom based netbooks. Otherwise I agree with you.

I voted absolute must, mostly because without 64-bit support, as more people get 64-bit capable systems and more RAM than can be efficiently handled by 32-bit systems even with PAE, 64-bit support will become a necessity. Don't think that it is that far off, the switch to 64-bit will come soon, in fact it is already upon us if only it weren't for M$ fat lazy @$$, as well as other proprietary software makers who lag behind the rest of the world.

Absolute Must.

Same reason as H_TeXMeX_H (4gb+ RAM).

While I don't care for "official" 64-bit support in Slackware, I have to say I switched to a 64-bit x86 operating system at the end of 2007 when I had a single core with 1 GB when it wasn't strictly necessary. As a developer I knew I'd switch to systems with multi core processors and 8GB of memory (and even more powerful in the future) sooner or later so going to 64-bit made a lot of sense, because I wouldn't have to make that same switch later on.

Since 2005 I also recompiled several Slackware releases for AMD Athlon to get better performance, because i486 instructions (even with i686 scheduling) don't get the most out of modern processors. Lately I've been thinking there are still valid uses of operating systems optimised for i486 for compatibility reasons, but that's more to do with embedded applications and using processors such as DM&P's Vortex86DX, which can't use newer ISA extensions because of Intel/AMD/Via patents.

I liked my poll options better. The more accurately represented the current feelings of 64 slackware. Of course slackware MUST be 64 at some point in the future. The question was "How important is 64-bit support in future Slackware?" and the pole answers have "I wants" and "I needs" instead of "slackware wants" and "slackware needs" Either way, I chose "I will need it at one point, but not soon." even tho I wanted to properly answer the question and select the first option.

Even our local Aldi only sells Desktop systems with 4gb ram.
That's today and not "at some point in the future".

Does Slackware need to support new_cheap hardware?
In my humble opinion, it does ;-)

Perhaps as important would be a 64bit operating system with programs and a scheduler that could handle multi-core processors efficiently. Is QNX the only one out there that is designed for multi-cores and that is only 32 bit.

samac

Maybe, but I think a number of your options were redundant or too complicated or too long.

Well, "it" refers to 64-bit support in future Slackware versions, so "I want it", "I need it" refers to this.

It's true Slackware has never been bleeding-edge, nor has it supported many architectures. But, as more people upgrade to 64-bit capable systems, they will choose other distros over Slackware if they want 64-bit support.

I honestly don't care,

Yes 64bit support would be nice for the systems that support it, but considering that people run Slackware on very low spec machines (I have it running on a 450mhz Pentium II system for a server) I think that 32bit should still be supported.

All i know is that where it goes, it goes, and I will follow.

I think that 32bit support as well as 64bit support should be implemented in the future. So far I love slack but I do wish it currently had 64bit support (in preparation for the advent of 64bit OS's being the mainstream). Eventually, I think that this should be considered to be somewhat of a priority. However, I think that 32bit builds should still be available as well so as not to leave some behind.

Considering that Pat maintains most of the distro himself, although there are contributors that help him, I seriously doubt there will be a hybrid Slackware 32 and 64. Whenever Slackware does finally go 64-bit, I think those that still want legacy 32-bit support, will either user a slightly older version of Slackware (because security updates are still available for older versions usually 3 or so versions back): Or, it could be just passed to the community itself so that a 32-bit version could still be maintained. (Like how there are third-party developers that are providing GNOME specifically for Slackware).


As for the whole 64-bits issue. I have rather mixed feelings anyways. I am running Slackware on my 64-bit notebook, and 32-bit ancient AMD, with no problems, and although I must use PAE for any memory > than 1GB, I am happy with the current setup. I may however would want to go purely 64-bit if I were to have anything > than 4GB. I know that PAE can handle more, but I'm not sure if I trust PAE for anything more than 4GB.

The only other issue is that getting all software to work in 64-bits. Firefox plugins come to mind, and most importantly device drivers. I still refuse even now to get a 64-bit copy of XP for my notebook, just because of device drivers and application issues.

I guess since there is also not much of a user demand for 64-bit (at least for most Slackers), then thats also another factor to consider in why Slackware has yet to make the jump to 64-bit. I dare say that Slackware is probably the last distro (that is if it isn't already), that will make the transition to 64-bit.

Personally I like the point that my most current slack still works on my oldest computer. Running a dual processor P1-166MHz that's doing the most important chores (firewalling, routing, webserver, mailserver, DNS, database server, etc) without complaining; I love that. I also love that the same works on my slightly newer computer (a quadcore athlon) where I can play my games.

Questions that are important are:
- will 32bit applications run on the 64bit platform? Often this requires double libraries, like slamd64 uses.
- is it really that much faster/better/etc to have 64 bit? How big is the improvement?

I doubt it will be a must soon, I love Slack being not bleeding edge, I put far more value in the stability. I know that if it becomes unstable, that it was me that messed up big-time. (not that I have had to live through that experience often, actually only once when I upgraded from 12.1 (that had gotten through many upgrades) to 12.2; I forgot to follow the last few important steps and could only blame myself for not following the manual ;-)

Conclusion: my answer is "I don't need it in the foreseeable future, but might one day." (applications have to become 64bit as well anyway, which is not that common yet)

Although it is already hard to find 32bit cpus, 64bit support will be absolutely necessary only once there is a program which needs to use more than 4GB of RAM (only for itself, without tricks with virtual memory).
Right now I don't know about such software, but on my machine gimp-colorize plugin already needs more than 3gigabytes of memory (it needs it for a good reason) to process one 1600x1200 photo.

First 64bit processor was released in 2003.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amd64