So I was able to crash safari just now

[CowZ]

So just now I was watching something on hulu and had another safari window open... I closed the second window and my safari crashed. Now, wasn't the new safari suppose to be uncrashable?

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: CowZ
So just now I was watching something on hulu and had another safari window open... I closed the second window and my safari crashed. Now, wasn't the new safari suppose to be uncrashable?

It is supposed to be yes. Are you running it on Snow Leopard in 64bit mode?

 

[CowZ]

Nope still 32-bit I havn't found a need to boot in 64 yet. I wonder what the deal is. SL havn't been a life changer for me so far... almost wish I didn't upgrade yet.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: CowZ
Nope still 32-bit I havn't found a need to boot in 64 yet. I wonder what the deal is. SL havn't been a life changer for me so far... almost wish I didn't upgrade yet.

Well, it should be running Safari in 64bit even if the kernel is 32bit. Open Activity Monitor and see what it says. If Safari is in 64bit then yes, it should have crash prevention, but if it is running in 32bit, then there is no crash prevention.

 

[CowZ]

You're right stu. Its running in 64bit. Odd... how did I crash safari.

 

[TheStu]

Are you able to replicate the problem?

 

[CowZ]

Happened to me twice. I think there might be a problem with the flash player? I believe it happens when I select for the video to pop out. Sometimes I get the color wheel and a warning said to cancel the script cause its making my computer slow.I'm not sure if I can fully replicate the problem though.

 

[Koing]

My Safari paused and stayed 'paused' when I had google maps. I had to force quit it 😛

Koing

 

[Nothinman]

Well, it should be running Safari in 64bit even if the kernel is 32bit.

That's backwards, 64-bit kernels can run 32-bit processes but not vice versa.

Now, wasn't the new safari suppose to be uncrashable?

That's pretty much impossible. At the best they could have another process that watches the Safari process and restarts it when it crashes, but they can't make it completely uncrashable.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Well, it should be running Safari in 64bit even if the kernel is 32bit.

That's backwards, 64-bit kernels can run 32-bit processes but not vice versa.

Now, wasn't the new safari suppose to be uncrashable?

That's pretty much impossible. At the best they could have another process that watches the Safari process and restarts it when it crashes, but they can't make it completely uncrashable.

Snow Leopard runs 64bit applications regardless of kernel. I am not a software engineer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I couldn't tell you how they do it, but that is what they do.

 

[Nothinman]

Snow Leopard runs 64bit applications regardless of kernel. I am not a software engineer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I couldn't tell you how they do it, but that is what they do.

Does Apple have docs saying that? AFAIK that's impossible. A processor switched into long mode can run 32-bit code, but not vice versa. And a 32-bit kernel couldn't load a 64-bit binary because of the differences in VM layout. A 32-bit kernel has 4G of VM so how is it supposed to manage a process with 8TB of VM?

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Snow Leopard runs 64bit applications regardless of kernel. I am not a software engineer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I couldn't tell you how they do it, but that is what they do.

Does Apple have docs saying that? AFAIK that's impossible. A processor switched into long mode can run 32-bit code, but not vice versa. And a 32-bit kernel couldn't load a 64-bit binary because of the differences in VM layout. A 32-bit kernel has 4G of VM so how is it supposed to manage a process with 8TB of VM?

This is from the John Siracusa article at Ars Technica on 10.6.

I am not sure where the documentation is on Apple's site, it can sometimes be difficult to find things like that, at least for me.

 

[Nothinman]

Originally posted by: TheStu

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Snow Leopard runs 64bit applications regardless of kernel. I am not a software engineer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I couldn't tell you how they do it, but that is what they do.

Does Apple have docs saying that? AFAIK that's impossible. A processor switched into long mode can run 32-bit code, but not vice versa. And a 32-bit kernel couldn't load a 64-bit binary because of the differences in VM layout. A 32-bit kernel has 4G of VM so how is it supposed to manage a process with 8TB of VM?

This is from the John Siracusa article at Ars Technica on 10.6.

I am not sure where the documentation is on Apple's site, it can sometimes be difficult to find things like that, at least for me.

I could never navigate Apple's site very well either, back when 10.4 came out a friend of mine asked about it and I couldn't for the life of me find out how much of the system was really 64-bit.

I guess thinking about it more, EFI could put the CPU into long mode and since the CPU can execute 32-bit code just fine in long mode it'll boot the 32-bit kernel. And if it can use PAE to track the pages normally out of it's reach and do some black magic on bootup to determine if it's a 64-bit or 32-bit CPU so that it can determine whether or not it should save/restore the additional registers present in long mode. I'm not sure of the interaction of PAE and long mode though, I'm running a 64-bit Linux kernel here and /proc/cpuinfo here says PAE is supported in the CPU flags but I don't know how to see if it's actually enabled.

But if true or close to it, that really gives new meaning to the term hackintosh.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Originally posted by: TheStu

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Snow Leopard runs 64bit applications regardless of kernel. I am not a software engineer, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I couldn't tell you how they do it, but that is what they do.

Does Apple have docs saying that? AFAIK that's impossible. A processor switched into long mode can run 32-bit code, but not vice versa. And a 32-bit kernel couldn't load a 64-bit binary because of the differences in VM layout. A 32-bit kernel has 4G of VM so how is it supposed to manage a process with 8TB of VM?

This is from the John Siracusa article at Ars Technica on 10.6.

I am not sure where the documentation is on Apple's site, it can sometimes be difficult to find things like that, at least for me.

I could never navigate Apple's site very well either, back when 10.4 came out a friend of mine asked about it and I couldn't for the life of me find out how much of the system was really 64-bit.

I guess thinking about it more, EFI could put the CPU into long mode and since the CPU can execute 32-bit code just fine in long mode it'll boot the 32-bit kernel. And if it can use PAE to track the pages normally out of it's reach and do some black magic on bootup to determine if it's a 64-bit or 32-bit CPU so that it can determine whether or not it should save/restore the additional registers present in long mode. I'm not sure of the interaction of PAE and long mode though, I'm running a 64-bit Linux kernel here and /proc/cpuinfo here says PAE is supported in the CPU flags but I don't know how to see if it's actually enabled.

But if true or close to it, that really gives new meaning to the term hackintosh.

Yea, they have definitely done some voodoo with Snow Leopard, 64bit apps on a 32bit kernel, Grand Central Dispatch to make programming for multicore CPUs easier, and OpenCL to take advantage of GPUs. All in all, if I were a developer I would definitely be intrigued by all this.

Also, isn't Dx11 on Windows 7 supposed to bring GPGPU stuff too? Very interesting stuff.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea, they have definitely done some voodoo with Snow Leopard, 64bit apps on a 32bit kernel, Grand Central Dispatch to make programming for multicore CPUs easier, and OpenCL to take advantage of GPUs. All in all, if I were a developer I would definitely be intrigued by all this.

The only real benefit of 64-bit apps on a 32-bit kernel is to support crappy hardware manufacturers and as such is a waste of developer time IMO. This is not the good kind of voodoo, if there is such a thing.

There's a thread on the Ars forums about why GCD is pretty 'meh'. You can't magically parallelize an app. The hard part is determining which parts of your process can be run in parallel and their interdependencies, once you've got that figured out the part where you count the available cores, create threads and start dispatching work to them is simple.

GPGPU stuff has been available with CUDA from nVidia and Stream from AMD/ATI, but it's nice to have an open standard now. So OpenCL is a good thing and it's nice that it's included in SL so adoption should be simple on Apple's platform. But while Apple is a member of the Khronos Group and does deserve some kudos for helping with it, there's a ton of other companies involved as well.