Star Linux on the Opteron, Part II
Linked by Robert Minvielle on Tue 16th Dec 2003 20:00 UTC
Linux This is the second installment of the "Linux on the Opteron, are we ready?" article. Basically, it is a "where are we now?" article, noting that what once did work now does not, and others that did not work now do. The first article was published on OSNews almost three months ago. Since that time not too much has happened publicly in regards to the amd64 Linux situation, but a lot of people mailed to tell me that I should have checked out SuSE or the new Mandrake which was "about to be released" at that time. Also since that time I have upgraded the RAM and acquired a larger hard disk for the machine. I will give a brief rundown of the system as it stands now, what I tried to install on it, and what works.
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Re: getting there
by number9 on Tue 16th Dec 2003 20:52 UTC


Well, the idebus argument is passed to the kernel to force
the PCI IDE speed. Notice on your gentoo/opteron system that
if you check the dmesg output you will see that the drives
are falling back to PIO mode at 33MHz. The idebus=50 kernel
arg will up this to 50MHz... or you can take rac's patch
for the nforce3 chipset and apply it to the kernel to make
full use of the Nforce3 chipset and possibly go UDMA.

Yes, I have seen the promise driver have problems... I would
wait on it. ;)

I have also gotten the opengl/etc to work on the firegl
in 32bit land on the opteron, but not in 64 bit under
gentoo.

Cheers.