[Leaplist] 64bit vs 32bit

[Bryan J. Smith]

Danny W. Burdick wrote:  
> Even in the windows world....those monkeys can't get winxp64
> drivers....right with all the kings horses.......

Other than the Windows IA-64 (Itanium) releases, which utterly lacks all
sorts of things (don't get me started), Microsoft hasn't offer a true
64-bit Windows.  They never have.  And it will be a long time before
they ever will.

Their Windows x64 NT5.1 (XP/2003) and NT6.0 (Vista/"Longhorn Server")
releases still ship with a crapload of Win32 libraries, not native Win64
libraries.  Most applications that want to have full Win64 operation
must provide their own libraries, or use non-default ones.  Microsoft
stuck with Win32 out of compatibility -- their codebase isn't designed
for any non-x86 data alignment nor anything but 20/24/32-bit segmented
addressing (like 48-bit Long Mode addressing in x86-64).

You can't even get a 32-bit desktop OS from Microsoft that supports PAE,
so you're stuck under 2-3GiB user-space usable.

Most of the driver support nightmares have arose out of the lack of
Win64 consideration in NT5.1 (XP/2003), and the darth of NT6.0
(Vista/"Longhorn Server") drivers -- 32-bit or 64-bit -- is due to the
massive ABI/API changes.  Once vendors actually start supporting the
NT6.0 changes, then it will be less of an issue for Vista/"Longhorn
Server."  But that basically means 100% new hardware, and most companies
aren't going to pay for old drivers to be re-written to the new model.

Hence why Windows driver support, x64 or Vista, just sucks right now.


-- 
Bryan J  Smith              Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
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