Michael B. Johnson5d ago

During production of Finding Nemo, we started using Linux boxes in addition to SGIs.
Why?

3D painting software we wrote for laying out coral was written in C++ using templates, and the debug info was too large for IRIX, but was debuggable on Linux.

Was this a 32 bit vs. 64 bit issue?

No.

IRIX reserved half the address space for the kernel, while Linux only did a quarter.

So on Linux, we had 3GB, and the symbols fit.

It was a 32 bit show, both machines had 4GB max.

Plenty for Finding Nemo.

Show threadMichael B. Johnson5d ago

How do I know this?

I was the project lead, although the best parts of it were written by my smarter collaborator Michael O’Brien (eventually SVP of R&D at Technicolor).

This story is *not* the 32 to 64 bit transition.

This is just us trying to get another GB of address space, where we leveraged the ongoing Linux port work w/alot of our own.

Now that I think about it, all the impactful work I’ve done in my career happened in 32 bits of address space.

4GB always seemed like a lot to me.

Show threadBjörn
@Drwave The address space limitations and exhaustion is also an issue when using Wine.
Windows also reserves about 2g of memory for the kernel.
This can clause issues when applications run on Linux as there is no such limitation or only the one you mentioned.
Address space exhaustion is a frequent issue for these kinds of programs especially on modern Linux.
Mar 17 at 8:48amTooter
Show threadJernej Simončič �5d ago
@thaodan @Drwave I'm not sure why this would be a problem with Wine – while 32-bit Windows defaults to 2/2GB split, you can configure it for 3/1GB (/3GB bootloader switch, or IncreaseUserVa from Vista onwards); 32-bit executables have to opt-in to make use of this; when such 32-bit executables are run on 64-bit Windows, they get nearly 4GB of address space.
/LARGEADDRESSAWARE (Handle Large Addresses)

Learn more about: /LARGEADDRESSAWARE (Handle Large Addresses)

Show threadBjörn5d ago

@jernej__s @Drwave I don't know why exactly either.
But I have gotten crashes with applications crashing the memory boundary with 32bit applications
regularly.

I once found a wine wiki that explained this issue more detailed but the only thing I could find was this:
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Wine-Developer's-Guide/Architecture-Overview#memory-management

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