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Snow Leopard refuses to boot into 64-bit.

greatmaju

greatmaju

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 13, 2008
69
0
A Little place i Call Terra
Brought snow Leopard from Apple, and got it yesterday.
I installed it today, and whilst it seems faster I have a few problems.
Mainly that it doesn't seem to boot into 64-bit mode, neither from an app changing it to boot into 64 bit or by pressing the 6 and 4 keys down.

Also, does anyone know why a plugin to make Quicklook have a list view for Folders won't work anymore?
 
greatmaju said:
Brought snow Leopard from Apple, and got it yesterday.
I installed it today, and whilst it seems faster I have a few problems.
Mainly that it doesn't seem to boot into 64-bit mode, neither from an app changing it to boot into 64 bit or by pressing the 6 and 4 keys down.

Also, does anyone know why a plugin to make Quicklook have a list view for Folders won't work anymore?
Click to expand...

Apparently you can only boot into 64-Bit kernel using a mac that has a 64 Bit EFI. See here : http://www.ahatfullofsky.comuv.com/English/Programs/SMS/SMS.html
 
not completely true. My macbook pro 3,1 cannot boot into 64 bit despite it has epi 64.

apple apparently has put some restriction so not all system is able to boot into the 64bit.

you can use 3rd party software to force it but when i use it it still not booting using hte 64bit kernel extension (which my opinion is just the driver). So my feeling is that the driver is not yet there.
 
chas0001 said:
Apparently you can only boot into 64-Bit kernel using a mac that has a 64 Bit EFI. See here : http://www.ahatfullofsky.comuv.com/English/Programs/SMS/SMS.html
Click to expand...
I heard, but I used that App to try to get it to boot into 64-bit, and it says
64 Bit Processor, 64 Bit EFI, 64 bit kernel boot mode, yet its still in 32 bit, after 3 tries.

(Macbook has an intel Core 2 Duo)

Although it has a X under supported. :confused:
Startup takes about 40 Secs, I'm sure its meant to be faster.
 
greatmaju said:
I heard, but I used that App to try to get it to boot into 64-bit, and it says
64 Bit Processor, 64 Bit EFI, 64 bit kernel boot mode, yet its still in 32 bit, after 3 tries.

(Macbook has an intel Core 2 Duo)

Although it has a X under supported. :confused:
Startup takes about 40 Secs, I'm sure its meant to be faster.
Click to expand...

Apparently apple put some restriction on Macbooks and Mac Minis
 
Surely this should of been known on the website. Such a big thing about the 64-bit, and yet they refuse the people with Minis and Macbooks to run it?

I feel that I have been cheated. Can't use a feature that I paid for....

(Although, on the Apple website, it states
64-bit support
requires a Mac with a 64-bit processor.
Click to expand...

Sigh, I have also found out that the date no longer appears next to the time, all it says now is Sun..

Still, it is a newly released OS, and it went far better then Vista. Just have to wait for a few updates I suppose.
 
greatmaju said:
Surely this should of been known on the website. Such a big thing about the 64-bit, and yet they refuse the people with Minis and Macbooks to run it?

I feel that I have been cheated. Can't use a feature that I paid for....

Sigh, I have also found out that the date no longer appears next to the time, all it says now is SUN.

Still, it is a newly released OS, and it went far better then Vista. Just have to wait for a few updates I suppose.
Click to expand...

Go to Date & Time Preferences -> Clock -> Tick "Show Date"
 
Even though the kernel doesn't boot in 64-bit it doesn't mean the OS isn't running in 64-bit. Apple has been smart and made the 32-bit kernel address more than 4GB of memory. Your needs are very special if you need the kernel to boot in 64-bit!
 
There are still a lot of 32 bit drivers. Depending on your mac, your hardware drivers may not be completely updated.

There's not a whole lot of advantage to having your kernel run in 64 bit anyway, since individual applications are where we spend most of our computing power/time.
 
Piit said:
Even though the kernel doesn't boot in 64-bit it doesn't mean the OS isn't running in 64-bit. Apple has been smart and made the 32-bit kernel address more than 4GB of memory. Your needs are very special if you need the kernel to boot in 64-bit!
Click to expand...
Had no idea about that, hmmm.

slughead said:
There are still a lot of 32 bit drivers. Depending on your mac, your hardware drivers may not be completely updated.
Click to expand...
How do you update drivers?
also, for Firmware updates, my Macbook isn't listed, so apparently it doesn't need any firmware updates.
 
greatmaju said:
Surely this should of been known on the website. Such a big thing about the 64-bit, and yet they refuse the people with Minis and Macbooks to run it?

I feel that I have been cheated. Can't use a feature that I paid for....

(Although, on the Apple website, it states


Sigh, I have also found out that the date no longer appears next to the time, all it says now is Sun..

Still, it is a newly released OS, and it went far better then Vista. Just have to wait for a few updates I suppose.
Click to expand...


Apple has been pretty consistent in saying that SL would be a 32-bit kernel with 64-bit optional.

There is no need to run the 64-bit kernel unless you have more than 32 gigs of memory.

You will NOT see performance increases (again unless you have > 32 gigs memory) or anything else by using the 64-bit kernel and will take a lot of pain with hardware compatibility.

Apps are allowed full 64-bit access to memory without emulation (short of it) so a 64-bit kernel is not needed.
 
Well in activity Monitor it lists several Apps (E.G Finder) as, under Kind Intel (64 bit)

So, can third party apps run in 64 bit even if you haven't booted into 64?

I do find that third part apps, like Flock and Photoshop CS4 runs very slow still, although I feel that my 2 GB RAM isn't cutting it for Photoshop (Along with the Intel GMA Graphics card)

I don't completely get Grand Central Dispatch. is it completely automatic? does it work with anything?
 
greatmaju said:
Well in activity Monitor it lists several Apps (E.G Finder) as, under Kind Intel (64 bit)

So, can third party apps run in 64 bit even if you haven't booted into 64?

I do find that third part apps, like Flock and Photoshop CS4 runs very slow still, although I feel that my 2 GB RAM isn't cutting it for Photoshop (Along with the Intel GMA Graphics card)

I don't completely get Grand Central Dispatch. is it completely automatic? does it work with anything?
Click to expand...

64-bit apps will run 64-bit without loading the 64-bit kernel. In fact, most of the Apple applications are in 64-bit. You are running 64-bit apps right now as you have seen in Activity Monitor. And you are doing it without a 64-bit kernel.

CS4 is not 64-bit nor is Flock. 2GB is not enough to run CS4 well.

Read up on GCD here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#grandcentral
 
greatmaju said:
Well in activity Monitor it lists several Apps (E.G Finder) as, under Kind Intel (64 bit)

So, can third party apps run in 64 bit even if you haven't booted into 64?

I do find that third part apps, like Flock and Photoshop CS4 runs very slow still, although I feel that my 2 GB RAM isn't cutting it for Photoshop (Along with the Intel GMA Graphics card)

I don't completely get Grand Central Dispatch. is it completely automatic? does it work with anything?
Click to expand...

Flock and Photoshop CS4 havent been rewritten to take advantage of SL, that's why they dont feel any different.

All the improvements in SL is under the hood, you dont need to worry about it :)
 
Aye, but I was wondering if SL would improve on the App load time etc etc...
I am using Safari at the moment, although I miss the Adblocker and several other plugins.

I think that is all, thanks to everyone!
:D
 
You can run safari in 32-bit mode.

Just to re-emphasize, 64-bit mode vs. 32-bit mode kernel and apps are seamlessly handled under the hood by OSX. The bit mode of the app really does not have much to do with how fast it will run. In fact, this mode switching has been a feature of OSX since 10.5. Now with SL, this feature is just significantly polished an all of Apple's nave apps have been re-coded and optimized. It just so happens that they are 64-bit, but 64-bit is not why they are faster.

To change Safari to 32-bit mode for plug-ins:

Right click on the application icon itself to do this (not the dock icon), click info and select 32-bit mode.

All your old plug-ins should work depending on how they were coded.
 
shakenmartini said:
There is no need to run the 64-bit kernel unless you have more than 32 gigs of memory.

You will NOT see performance increases (again unless you have > 32 gigs memory) or anything else by using the 64-bit kernel and will take a lot of pain with hardware compatibility.

Apps are allowed full 64-bit access to memory without emulation (short of it) so a 64-bit kernel is not needed.
Click to expand...

Actually, diglloyd IS finding that using the 64-bit kernel is slightly faster even with CS4 (he's using 12GB of RAM).

http://macperformanceguide.com/SnowLeopard-Performance.html#diglloydSpeed1

I think generally MOST people shouldn't be concerned with the 64-bit kernel. Unless you are doing work that COULD take advantage of it, Apple has done a nice job giving people hybrid 64-bit support.

-Kevin
 
kbmb said:
Actually, diglloyd IS finding that using the 64-bit kernel is slightly faster even with CS4 (he's using 12GB of RAM).

http://macperformanceguide.com/SnowLeopard-Performance.html#diglloydSpeed1

I think generally MOST people shouldn't be concerned with the 64-bit kernel. Unless you are doing work that COULD take advantage of it, Apple has done a nice job giving people hybrid 64-bit support.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

We only see it with large files and lots of RAM. If you look closely at his data he is seeing less than 5% speed increase. We see the same, little to no difference in our Macs with less than 32 gigs. However, we have a few systems with 128 gigs and there we see at least 10-20% performance gain in 64-bit mode.

On our macs than have 4 gigs of memory the speed difference is less than 1%.

These are all tests that we have done internally processing genome mapping data where we have large file being mapped into memory (40+ gigs) and several hundred gigs of data.

So again, there really is no reason to go 64-bit for less than a 1% speed up, but only if you have a lot of memory and do computationally intensive tasks.

To be honest, instead of messing with a 64-bit kernel, if you want to speed up a mac, run it off of a SSD. We regularly see 20-30% gains in performance on our machines with the newer SSD's with good SATA controllers.
 
shakenmartini said:
We only see it with large files and lots of RAM. If you look closely at his data he is seeing less than 5% speed increase. We see the same, little to no difference in our Macs with less than 32 gigs. However, we have a few systems with 128 gigs and there we see at least 10-20% performance gain in 64-bit mode.

On our macs than have 4 gigs of memory the speed difference is less than 1%.

These are all tests that we have done internally processing genome mapping data where we have large file being mapped into memory (40+ gigs) and several hundred gigs of data.

So again, there really is no reason to go 64-bit for less than a 1% speed up, but only if you have a lot of memory and do computationally intensive tasks.

To be honest, instead of messing with a 64-bit kernel, if you want to speed up a mac, run it off of a SSD. We regularly see 20-30% gains in performance on our machines with the newer SSD's with good SATA controllers.
Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more. Right now I think for most people the 64-bit kernel would be more hassle than help.

I was just showing the minor, but interesting, gains diglloyd was finding between the 32/64 bit kernels even though the app itself is only 32-bit.

Can't wait to see apps in the future!

-Kevin
 
I already noticed third parties giving 64bit support.

The new Flip4Mac beta is 64 bit and works with QuickTime X
Colloquy is 64 bit.

That's all I've noticed so far.
 
I have a old model MBP, think was first with the Core 2 Duo chips as opposed to Core Duo, trying to boot into 64 bit, tried using the fullofsky software, which said i was capable of 64 bit if i had a 64 bit EFI, which is only 32 bit, everything else is 64 bit capable, how do i update my EFI to 64 bit?
 
greatmaju said:
Surely this should of been known on the website. Such a big thing about the 64-bit, and yet they refuse the people with Minis and Macbooks to run it?

I feel that I have been cheated. Can't use a feature that I paid for....

(Although, on the Apple website, it states


Sigh, I have also found out that the date no longer appears next to the time, all it says now is Sun..

Still, it is a newly released OS, and it went far better then Vista. Just have to wait for a few updates I suppose.
Click to expand...


You're not cheated. 64-bit support means support for 64-bit apps. 64-bit kernel is a different story. The only thing you're cheated of is having correct information and muddy/confused concepts of 64-bit.
 
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