# Athlon 64

## ali

Guys,

Just as a point of interest - now the Hammer is out to buy, what kind of support does Gentoo have for it?  Do all we need is a new kernel & cpu compile flags or something more fundamental?

Has anyone got a Hammer & managed to get it working in 64bit mode under Gentoo (or anything else for that matter)?

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## payam

from the latest news i've heard: the linux kernel already supports amd hammer processors. the gcc compiler doesn't have a -march=athlon64 or -march=opteron option yet, but it does have:

-m64 

Generate code for a 32-bit or 64-bit environment. The 32-bit environment sets int, long and pointer to 32 bits and generates code that runs on any i386 system. The 64-bit environment sets int to 32 bits and long and pointer to 64 bits and generates code for AMD's x86-64 architecture. 

therefore you can compile code for amd64 chips, but it's not optimized in the "march" sense. last i heard, there is a group of people working on optimizations for these chips. i would expect the future optimizations to add a lot of speed since the amd64 architecture really has a lot of potential.

if you own an opteron processor now, i think all you can do for now is use the -m64 option to generate appropriate code for your processor, and, of course, set the linux kernel architecture option to x86-64. then when the gcc -march flags are updated, you can change your make.conf and then do a:

```
emerge glibc

emerge -e --deep world
```

and that will recompile EVERYTHING on your machine (the reason you need to do glibc separate is because the -e flag still pretends that glibc is present, but that all other programs are not)

now, as far as portage is concerned, i'm not sure if it needs to be aware that you're compiling 64-bit executables for a new architecture. linux, however, is fully compliant with amd64 chips (see suse, redhat, etc), and the optimizations for gcc are on the way.

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## lghman

Check out this post.  It goes into alot of the details for all 64 bit processors.

--sonik

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## ali

Nice once guys - looks like ol' Linux has beaten another well know software company to it!

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## Moled

the hammer was released O_o

thought that wasnt due till the end of september :/

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## Tester

The Athon64 .. ie the consumer edition is comming at the end of september, but the Opteron (ie Xeon competitor) is already here.. We have a Gentoo port that's almost ready, a LiveCD should be comming soon.

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## Tamerz

Sweet!  Getting my Athlon 64 next week and need an OS.

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## etrigan63

 *Tester wrote:*   

> The Athon64 .. ie the consumer edition is comming at the end of september, but the Opteron (ie Xeon competitor) is already here.. We have a Gentoo port that's almost ready, a LiveCD should be comming soon.

 

Most excellent! My Tyan K8W arrives tomorrow and hopefully my Opetron 242's and RAM will be here next week. I will post a review at my site, PlanetAMD64, once I am done.

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