[Fwd: Re: Switch SPARC GNU coreutils+bash from 32 to 64bit [PSARC/2008/351]

[Alan Coopersmith]

Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
>> I can think of three main categories of capacity limits on 32-bit that
>> might
>> be higher on 64-bit:
>> * file size max of 2GB
>> * register size and usage
>> * available address space, and therefore amount that can be mmap()'d
>> at once
>> (Also, IIRC stdio is supposed to handle > 256 file pointers on 64-bit.)

Yes, the 256 FILE stdio limit is lifted in 64-bit.   The other main
advantage I'm aware of is 64-bit time_t, so you can work with timestamps
outside the 1970-2038 range, which there is no way to do in 32-bit (the
large file compilation flags only raised the sizes to 64-bit, not the
timestamps).

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering