We have been doing upgrades to take advantage of their new SSD drives. We are running on older Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit systems.

We have been changing our kernels from 32-bit to "latest 64-bit" in order to do the new upgrades. This has been working well so far (the 32-bit software we are running is happy to run in the 64-bit kernel), but I was wondering if this changes glibc or not. The only Linode we have where that might be a concern is one Linode where we build software with a C compiler and I didn't necessarily want to change the version of glibc used in making the build yet.

Yes, I know we should upgrade the actual distributions to a newer 64-bit Ubuntu, but that is a bigger project and not something we are ready to do just yet. So for the time being we just want to run using the latest 64-bit kernel, since it doesn't seem to be doing any harm. We are currently just concerned about the impact on glibc for creating builds from C source.

Of course if anybody know of any other downsides to running the 64-bit kernel (wasting memory?) please feel free to speak up!

Thanks,

Doug

glibc doesn't change; glibc is related to the "bit"-ness of the applications you're running. A 32bit app needs 32bit libc; a 64bit app needs 64bit libc. And both can live on the same machine at the same time.

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

Thanks, Stephen.

I wonder what the significance of running the 64 bit kernel is. We haven't run into any problems so far.