64 bit images are rare, unappreciated, and poorly supported (all Squeak
images of practical interest are 32 bit images with 32 bit object memory
word size). However, 64 bit VMs are commonplace and work quite well on
hardware and operating systems such as yours. You may need to load the
changes on Mantis bug report 5688, and check Mantis for other issues in
the "Squeak 64 bit" category if you run into problems, but other than
that a 64 bit VM built on your system should work fine and should run
normal 32 bit images without problems.

64-bit images are indeed "unappreciated".

I suspect that part of the reason for the lack of appreciation is that
there's little information about them. For instance,
http://squeakvm.org/squeak64/ hasn't been updated since 2004-10-28.
That's nearly 3 years ago. http://wiki.squeak.org:8080/squeak/560
has not been updated for even longer.

I'm sure that there's been a lot of work done by various 64-bit people
since then, but if so, then where do I (and other curious people) find
out about it? Are there other sites?

What would be neat would be a page, either at squeakvm.org or on
the wiki, which would answer some of the common 64-bit questions
that come up from time to time. For instance, here are some of mine:

- For which hardware/OS combinations is there a 64-bit VM?
- Does this VM run both 32-bit and 64-bit images?
- How do I convert a 32-bit image to a 64-bit one?
- My OS allows a single process to grow to 3.75GB ; if I need a lot of
objects can I use a 32-bit image / VM, or must I use a 64-bit one?
- What are the advantages/disadvantages to using 64-bits?
- Why isn't there an officially-released 64-bit image?

I suspect that if this basic information was available, there'd be rather
more interest, which would lead to more testing, more bug reports,
more fixes, etc.

Andrew