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Hi,
If I was to install a 64-bit version of Ubuntu on machine due to having more than 3.5GB of RAM, could I run 32-bit XBMC on top without any problems?
Am I right in thinking that having a 64-bit OS wouldn't make any difference because XBMC runs in 32-bit mode and wont be able to use the RAM over 3.5GB? So until XBMC is ported to 64-bit, it can not take advantage of the higher RAM?
Cheers,
Rory
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A bigger problem is that xbmc does not use that much memory anyway. Some operations are quicker in 64bit as far as I understand but I have not seen any such arguments for xbmc.
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I guess I was thinking more about the higher end skins like Aeon which do load a lot of heavy graphics...just wondered if having a 64-bit OS would improve performance much?
Cheers,
Rory
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It may be quicker in true 64bit but not becuase of the extra memory I dont think. You should also note that that 64bit will require MORE memory. In theory this could make your system run slower.
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bobo1on1
cheapass Team-XBMC Developer
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If you install a 32 bit version of ubuntu, you automatically get a pae enabled kernel, so you can use 64 gb of ram max.
However you're still limited to 4 gb per process.
Using a 64 bit ubuntu with a 64 bit xbmc should work ok.
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I have ubuntu x64 and frequently build xbmc from git repository.
I've got about 2TB of media, the largest file in ~/.xbmc/userdata/Database/ is 3MB, and I'm using refocus skin.
xbmc.bin has VSZ of about 720MB on my system, and my memory usage is relatively flat.
I don't think you will perceive a difference in performance in x64. Unless you have a very memory hungry JVM also running on the same system, you probably won't notice the lack of 64-bit.
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I'm running 64 bit Ubuntu 11.04 with xbmc built from git. I agree with routehero, I notice no difference in performance from the 32 bit version of the same build I run on Ubuntu 11.04 32 bit.