Linked by Robert Minvielle on Tue 16th Dec 2003 20:00 UTC
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.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
I've got a quad processor HP rx8620 itanium2 box at work with (a measly) 16GB of RAM in it. It's my new testbed system. Runs 64 bit Linux (debian distro, with some stuff re-compiled in 64 bit). The db is postgres (32 bit), so the big win is just flat memory addressing and those sexy big caches.
The windows weenie has a quad processor Xeon with 16GB RAM running Win2K DataCenter and MS SQL Enterprise that's been kicking my little workstation install of postgres for a couple of months. That's some hella expensive software and hardware. And he sure didn't have any trouble reminding me of it.
Anyway, the db's performance on linux64/postgres flat out blows the windows system out of the water. Seriously, I'm getting performance gains in excess of an order of magnitude. First we thought there was a mistake in the testing but... not that I'm rubbing it in or anything.
Of course this isn't exactly the kind of gear you put on a desktop. It lives in a rack in the land-o-unpleasant air-conditioning. Shame really since it's got some sexy blinkenlights.