SabayonLinux 3.3 64-bit miniEdition
The single-CD "miniEdition" of SabayonLinux 3.3 has been released
64-Studio
Audio focused 64-bit Linux distribution.
Beta Ubuntu 7.04 "Fiesty Fawn" released
26 March 2007
HP tool update
New Release! HP Code Advisor C.01.15 is now available for free download.
The following are the notable features of this release:
* Generate code complexity metrics to gauge the complexity of the code being developed or migrated
* Detect multi-thread programming issues
* Create easily manageable snapshots of the PDB
* New options for finer control of the diagnostics at individual module and macro levels
* Improved cross-file analysis time
* Enhancements to the -crossfile option for selective enablement
* -target option to help reduce build to only modified elements
* Enhancements to reporting, including generation of HTML report
HP C Advise
Like "lint", this tool seems great at running some more thorough code analysis. I recommend running this if you have HP Itanium systems.
The following are the notable features of this release:
* Generate code complexity metrics to gauge the complexity of the code being developed or migrated
* Detect multi-thread programming issues
* Create easily manageable snapshots of the PDB
* New options for finer control of the diagnostics at individual module and macro levels
* Improved cross-file analysis time
* Enhancements to the -crossfile option for selective enablement
* -target option to help reduce build to only modified elements
* Enhancements to reporting, including generation of HTML report
HP C Advise
Like "lint", this tool seems great at running some more thorough code analysis. I recommend running this if you have HP Itanium systems.
20 March 2007
Solaris Express Developer Edition 2/07
Sun has a great new edition of Solaris aimed at developers.
"Solaris Express Developer Edition is an OpenSolaris-based distribution for x86 that includes the latest tools, technologies, and platforms to create applications for Solaris OS"
It includes Sun Studio 11 pre-installed, as well as NetBeans & Web 2.0 tools, StarOffice 8.0, Solaris + AMP and much more. The OS is Solaris Express Community Edition build 55. This edition is x86 only.
There is also a VMware packaged edition on the link below. I tested that 64-bit download in VMware Server and it worked really well.
Sun Developer Site : Solaris Express Developer Edition
Sun Developer Site : Download Page
"Solaris Express Developer Edition is an OpenSolaris-based distribution for x86 that includes the latest tools, technologies, and platforms to create applications for Solaris OS"
It includes Sun Studio 11 pre-installed, as well as NetBeans & Web 2.0 tools, StarOffice 8.0, Solaris + AMP and much more. The OS is Solaris Express Community Edition build 55. This edition is x86 only.
There is also a VMware packaged edition on the link below. I tested that 64-bit download in VMware Server and it worked really well.
Sun Developer Site : Solaris Express Developer Edition
Sun Developer Site : Download Page
13 March 2007
AMD/ATI losing the geeks ?
When AMD introduced the Athlon, everyone seemed to notice, but especially the geek crowd. It was a great new processor. When they introduced the Athlon64 and Intel stated that 64-bit was not in their desktop future, the geeks and techies went crazy for AMD. It's been hugely successful and AMD64 is a great architecture. It almost feels like amazing good Alpha CPU didn't die, in some ways it's lived on in the AMD64.
The pendulum swung in favour of AMD and stayed there.
Intel backtracked and then copied the AMD64 and called in EM64T. But Intel were in a mess, developers, geeks and techies wanted fast 32/64-bit capable Athlon64 chips and didn't want the high power usage Pentium4. Company trouble at Intel also made things worse for them, layoffs occurred to try to sort things out.
But....
Geeks have respect for Intel again after it ditched the Pentium4 and released the Core CPU. The Core is a great CPU, lower power usage & very fast performance. Core Duo in a latop out performs the fastest AMD laptop CPU (Turion64). But it didn't stop there, they released desktop and laptop Core Duo CPUs and then enabled 64-bit CPUs for all via the Core 2 Duo. Core 2 Duo is even faster and even more energy efficient. I can understand why Apple switched to it (although it has taken me a long time to accept it & then try to understand why, I liked PowerPC).
Intel have raised the stakes yet again by releasing a Xeon 64-bit Quad CPU that uses 50W
Intel Xeon
The Register : New Xeon
I think that AMD made improvements, some of the dual core Athlon X2 CPUs use less or the same power as the old single core CPUs. But at the same time, Intel introduced a new CPU architecture and then improved upon it with the Core 2 Duo. AMD should have had the K8L out and ready, it does look interesting.
Drivers
Linux people that want to try out the great looking features of Beryl/Compiz etc. they are finding that ATI does not support this in their binary driver. Linux devs and users are being forced to switch to Intel (open source driver) or NVidia (binary driver supports AIGLX) instead.
The pendulum swung in favour of AMD and stayed there.
Intel backtracked and then copied the AMD64 and called in EM64T. But Intel were in a mess, developers, geeks and techies wanted fast 32/64-bit capable Athlon64 chips and didn't want the high power usage Pentium4. Company trouble at Intel also made things worse for them, layoffs occurred to try to sort things out.
But....
Geeks have respect for Intel again after it ditched the Pentium4 and released the Core CPU. The Core is a great CPU, lower power usage & very fast performance. Core Duo in a latop out performs the fastest AMD laptop CPU (Turion64). But it didn't stop there, they released desktop and laptop Core Duo CPUs and then enabled 64-bit CPUs for all via the Core 2 Duo. Core 2 Duo is even faster and even more energy efficient. I can understand why Apple switched to it (although it has taken me a long time to accept it & then try to understand why, I liked PowerPC).
Intel have raised the stakes yet again by releasing a Xeon 64-bit Quad CPU that uses 50W
Intel Xeon
The Register : New Xeon
I think that AMD made improvements, some of the dual core Athlon X2 CPUs use less or the same power as the old single core CPUs. But at the same time, Intel introduced a new CPU architecture and then improved upon it with the Core 2 Duo. AMD should have had the K8L out and ready, it does look interesting.
Drivers
Linux people that want to try out the great looking features of Beryl/Compiz etc. they are finding that ATI does not support this in their binary driver. Linux devs and users are being forced to switch to Intel (open source driver) or NVidia (binary driver supports AIGLX) instead.
02 March 2007
VMWare Fusion Beta 2
arstechnia reports VMWare Fusion Beta 2 comes with "Experimental 3D Acceleration"
I'm not personally interested in 3D support, but it looks like it's going to be a great product. It does support 32-bit and 64-bit guests, which Parallels does not. The 64-bit support in VMware Server is excellent, I would expect that support in Fusion to be good also.
I'm not personally interested in 3D support, but it looks like it's going to be a great product. It does support 32-bit and 64-bit guests, which Parallels does not. The 64-bit support in VMware Server is excellent, I would expect that support in Fusion to be good also.
28 February 2007
Win64: slow progress
I was looking through an XML library this week. It's one that compiles on various UNIX platforms, and Mac OS X and Windows. Primarily it's been built for Windows 32-bit, but it has been built for 64-bit UNIXs so I thought that the code would be code and ready for Windows 64-bit.
I was a little surprised to find that it was not anywhere near ready. I think the authors had assumed that the UNIX LP64 programming model is the same as the Windows 64-bit LLP64 programming model.
Variable sizes in 32/64-bit modes :
Maybe it's the fact that in LLP64, the size of a long is different from LP64 that is confusing some development, but the compiler does help. With VS2005, if you try to put a pointer into a long it flags an error.
Another issue is HANDLE, which I have mentioned before.
I found hundreds of such errors when building this XML library. I think it will take a while for Windows developers of native code to catch up to VS2005 and then to catch up to 64-bit.
I was a little surprised to find that it was not anywhere near ready. I think the authors had assumed that the UNIX LP64 programming model is the same as the Windows 64-bit LLP64 programming model.
Variable sizes in 32/64-bit modes :
32bit LP64 LLP64
int 4 4 4
long 4 8 4
void * 4 8 8
HANDLE 4 8 8
Maybe it's the fact that in LLP64, the size of a long is different from LP64 that is confusing some development, but the compiler does help. With VS2005, if you try to put a pointer into a long it flags an error.
Another issue is HANDLE, which I have mentioned before.
I found hundreds of such errors when building this XML library. I think it will take a while for Windows developers of native code to catch up to VS2005 and then to catch up to 64-bit.
08 February 2007
Intel Article on multithreaded programming
Intel: Nuts and Bolts of Multithreaded Programming
Get the basics about parallel algorithms, parallel programming APIs, and the tools required to start writing your own parallel programs.
Article: Moving to Windows Vista x64
CodeProject: Moving to Windows Vista x64
A very interesting & technically detailed article about 64-bit programming on Vista x64.
A very interesting & technically detailed article about 64-bit programming on Vista x64.
23 January 2007
New Valgrind 3.2.3 released
Release 3.2.3 (29 Jan 2007)
Updated to fix some problems with recent 3.2.2 release.
This tool is amazing for error checking C and/or C++ programs both in 32-bit and 64-bit mode.
Valgrind 3.2.3
Valgrind news
18 January 2007
04 January 2007
New site found
start64 seems to be a great website for general 64-bit news and news of 64-bit software updates.
02 January 2007
LFS: a stepping stone to pure 64-bit software
One way to progress to pure 64-bit clean source code, is to add LFS support to your 32-bit code base.
Large File Specification (LFS) is a way of getting 64-bit file handling into your 32-bit code base.
Basically, you need to rebuild your 32-bit code with the following flags passed to your C and/or C++ compiler :
I've found this to work on every UNIX that I have encountered.
When enabled, all of your 'off_t' variables will be 64-bits wide.
Also you calls to fseek maybe mapped to fseek64 etc.
You should enable this and then work on updating your code base to handle it. You would have to do this anyway for pure 64-bit support.
Links
Wikipedia: LFS
Large File Specification (LFS) is a way of getting 64-bit file handling into your 32-bit code base.
Basically, you need to rebuild your 32-bit code with the following flags passed to your C and/or C++ compiler :
-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64I've found this to work on every UNIX that I have encountered.
When enabled, all of your 'off_t' variables will be 64-bits wide.
Also you calls to fseek maybe mapped to fseek64 etc.
You should enable this and then work on updating your code base to handle it. You would have to do this anyway for pure 64-bit support.
Links
Wikipedia: LFS
01 January 2007
Ubuntu performance : 32-bit vs 64-bit
Phoronix : Ubuntu: 32-bit v. 64-bit Performance
They compare the latest version of Ubuntu and a beta release, to test 64-bit vs. 32-bit performance at various tasks.
They compare the latest version of Ubuntu and a beta release, to test 64-bit vs. 32-bit performance at various tasks.
21 December 2006
Ubuntu 6.10 64-bit release: Revisited
I finally installed this release after debating for a while.
I have to say, it's the best 64-bit GNU/Linux that I have ever used. Superb from boot up to shutdown :-)
It's by far the fastest Linux that I have used, very snappy and responsive. The ATI driver support worked really well, it installed fine and my ATI X1300 Pro works very well.
Support seems excellent, the documentation on ubuntu.com is really helpful.
So far, it seems much more polished than openSUSE 10.2 which I installed at the same time. 10.2 is pretty poor in comparison to Ubuntu 6.10.
I look forward to new Ubuntu releases.
Highly recommended.
I have to say, it's the best 64-bit GNU/Linux that I have ever used. Superb from boot up to shutdown :-)
It's by far the fastest Linux that I have used, very snappy and responsive. The ATI driver support worked really well, it installed fine and my ATI X1300 Pro works very well.
Support seems excellent, the documentation on ubuntu.com is really helpful.
So far, it seems much more polished than openSUSE 10.2 which I installed at the same time. 10.2 is pretty poor in comparison to Ubuntu 6.10.
I look forward to new Ubuntu releases.
Highly recommended.
08 December 2006
07 December 2006
Updated Apple 64-bit support
Apple Developer : Leopard Developer Application Technologies Overview
Above link has lots of information about changes for Leopard. Most of the interesting 64-bit stuff is near the end.
"Leopard brings complete 64-bit support to all of the Mac OS X frameworks"
Above link has lots of information about changes for Leopard. Most of the interesting 64-bit stuff is near the end.
"Leopard brings complete 64-bit support to all of the Mac OS X frameworks"
30 November 2006
Linux: 64 Studio 1.0 released
Desktop Linux reports that 64 Studio 1.0, aka "Olympic, has been released. It's a Debian based 64-bit Gnu/Linux.
DistroWatch entry 64 Studio
64Studio.com link
64Studio Press Release
DistroWatch entry 64 Studio
64Studio.com link
64Studio Press Release
29 November 2006
14 November 2006
Windows PowerShell 1.0 64-bit
Windows PowerShell 1.0 for 64-bit appears to have been released.
Downloads for Windows XP 64-bit & Windows 2003 x86 64-bit & Itanium.
Download link
Downloads for Windows XP 64-bit & Windows 2003 x86 64-bit & Itanium.
Download link
08 November 2006
More Vista 64-bit
Vista x64 build 5744 (RC2)
It's another improvement for Vista. Smoother & faster then RC1. It found all of my hardware again, and is working well. Installation was just as quick & painless.
I opted to reformatting the Vista partition and installed fresh.
The 3D stuff works well, it's a bit gimicky, but it works. I've found that most companies I've seen just switch to Classic, so a lot of those features will be lost on them.
Now that Vista has gone to manufacturing, I imagine they've done more incremental improvements. This build goes further in speed & seems more polished. It's still not as fast as XP on the same machine, but it's a good improvement.
It's another improvement for Vista. Smoother & faster then RC1. It found all of my hardware again, and is working well. Installation was just as quick & painless.
I opted to reformatting the Vista partition and installed fresh.
The 3D stuff works well, it's a bit gimicky, but it works. I've found that most companies I've seen just switch to Classic, so a lot of those features will be lost on them.
Now that Vista has gone to manufacturing, I imagine they've done more incremental improvements. This build goes further in speed & seems more polished. It's still not as fast as XP on the same machine, but it's a good improvement.
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