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.
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I think that guy has given up with Gentoo too soon.
I have had same problems, but managed to overcome them.
Main headaches were:
'I had to use stage3 tarball (instead of stage1), emerge the things I wanted and then reemerge everything again with "emerge -e world"
Only periphery that doesn't work on my Dual Opteron is sound. Everything else works very well.
From the software perspective, many packages are still masked, but main things work (X, KDE, Gnome, some games, and yes-OpenGL works too). On non-working list are OpenOffice and AbiWord, for example.
I could probably make them work under 32-bit emulation, but I didn't want to fudge with this, I will rather wait to see 64-bit version.
Opteron works very nicely under Win2000/Win XP, but with Gentoo in 64-bit mode it really flies.
I have bought two identical dual Opteron machines and I'm so pleased with performance that I'm buying me a third one.
One machine works on Win XP, one is dual boot Win2000/Gentoo and third will replace existing fileserver/firewall/pribteserver/etc.
I am using:
Opteron 240 (2 CPU)
Motherboard Tyan Thunder K8W S2885
2 Gb DDR PC 2700 ECC Reg. RAM (4 sticks x512Mb)
nVidia GF4 Ti4200
HDD 120 Gb WDC
All machines are on 1 Gbit Ethernet switch (i have found quite nice and still on the cheap side Linksys SD2008)
It's fun to see hard disk as a bottleneck when copying files through the LAN ;o)
Also, PCI-X slots absolutely rock. Old PCI on my dual P3 board camo on the verge of saturation when trensferring files to/from disks. With a nice RAID card (I'm waiting for 3Ware 7506-12) this problem should be mnitigated for quite a few years to come...