Discussion
Mageia is available in both 32 bits and 64 bits. You have to choose which image to use by selecting it for the installation of your system. The choice is in relation to the hardware and the usages, according to:
- the processor
- the RAM memory size
- the maximum size of a single process.
The Architecture of the processors are in 64 bits for a long time (see Wikipedia). Thus, you have probably a processor which is 64-bits able. But it is also 32-bits able.
Some hardwares are only 32-bits. -
Thus have you mandatory to use 64-bits architecture?
The answer is not so automatic.
What 64-bit will buy you on your machines is binaries and libraries that take up more disk space, as well as binaries and libraries that take up more RAM memory when they're loaded. Thus, there is more chance that you get more swapping and definitely less efficient cache utilization. Those, obviously, are disadvantages. It will also give your programs the ability to use all of the CPU registers, which is an advantage. As a result, some things are more efficient and some are actually less efficient.
Don't get thrown off by the "gives the ability to use more memory thing." 32-bit Linux can use up to 64GB of memory just fine as it is, so the 4GB RAM for a whole machine is not a meaningful barrier. However, what is meaningful is the amount of memory that a single *process* can use, as this is limited to slightly less than 4GB if you're on 32-bit, so this can be a meaningful restriction for some use cases (usually on servers). In these cases though, you'd obviously already have well more than 4GB of RAM in the machine.
Another aspect is the usage of advanced features of processors. Our builds on i586 architecture do not use sse nor sse2 instructions, even if most of the processors have them. Thus applications with intensive computation don't exploit all capacities of the processor, which is bad.
To conclude, most of the time, you will prefer to use 64 bits architecture to get more performances from your hardware. This will not change really when the distro provides i686 packages.
However, if you stick with 2GB of RAM, 64-bit may work against you by using more of limited resources.
