64-Bit Adventures

Posted February 6th, 2008 by admin

Doing serious work on Linux requires a willingness to go down the rabbit hole as far as it will take you. This must be part of the reason why serious Web developers like the mac—generally things work. Last week, after getting the 64 bit desktop up and running, I downloaded 64-bit eclipse and ran it. The experience was like juggling clubs filled with nitroglycerine. It was fine until some random moment that everything blew up. I’d be in my flow zone, open a file, and poof, Eclipse crashed. I tried Eclipse 3.2 and 3.3—same result. I tried sun’s 1.5 and 1.6 VM—same result.

After some substantial amount of digging, I read that BEA’s JRockit VM does a much better job in 64-bit Linux. After downloading it, installing it to /usr/lib/jvm and running:

Life was much, much better.

Opinion on the street is that Sun’s 64-bit Linux VM is not very good. My particular configuration (Ubuntu Gutsy 64 bit) seems to agree. I wonder who should get the bug report on this one.

(Hat tips to Dave Shuck and this Ubuntu bug)