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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We have a K8W with 8 GB RAM, and 2 Opteron 242's. We got it from Monarchcomputer.com. They were very responsive, and did a good job. It cost about $4,500 without the monitor (8x 1GB PC2700 doesn't come cheap). This system has been completely stable.
I put Redhat 3.0 AS beta (Taroon) on it with only one hitch. It didn't recognise the fancy dual-DVI Matrox video card. A plain text screen also is odd; It is stretched two lines too long and I couldn't adjust the monitor enough to fix it. I downloaded the X source and compiled it, and X runs now, but with just a plain window manager, so I just dropped that. I have mostly been accessing the machine remotely with ssh and VNC, and that works just great for me.
We were able to obtain the source code for the gene fragment assembly software CAP3 (many thanks to the author Xiaoqiu Huang) and easily recompile it. The largest job so far took about 6.8 GB RAM, and took over 30 hours to run. This same job was impossible on our dual Athlon. We can finally do some really big stuff and are very happy so far.
We are still waiting for a good non-beta 64-bit os (something like WhiteBox), but can get by for now. I don't intend to get _trapped_ into anything RedHat ever again. (Yes, I know they have an academic version. No, I don't want Fedora64. I'm not bitter, see?).
Regards,
Steve Wanamaker
Department of Botany and Plant Sciences
University of California, Riverside