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 just built a box with dual opty's and I have to say I'm very impressed with the linux support that is out there. Here is the basic setup:
1 x Tyan Thunder K8W
2 x AMD Opteron Model 246 2.0GHz
2 x 512MB Mushkin PC4000 <-- [edit] Replaced with dual 512MB ECC PC3200 Mushkin sticks
2 x Thermaltake A1744 Venus 12 HSF w/ 80mm fan
1 x Antec 550W EPS12V PSU
1 x PNY Quadro4 NVS200 64MB SDR AGP w/ Dual DVI out
1 x Hercules 7.1 Fortissimo II
1 x Adaptec SCSI Ultra 160
1 x Quantum Atlas 10K 36GB U160 HD
2 x Quantum Atlas 10K 9GB U160 HD (Soft RAID 0)
1 x Western Digital 120GB UATA HD
1 x Sony DRU500A DVD+-RW
1 x Pioneer DVD303 slot load
2 x Samsung 191T
First thing I did with my MSDN subscription was download the WXP 64-bit evaluation and take it for a test drive. It loaded right up with 64-bit drivers for everything except my Quatro and Fortissimo. NVidia has a wxp 64-bit driver for the Quatro which runs very nicely in dual-headed mode, but unfortunately there are no 7.1 drivers for my sound card so I was stuck with the onboard AMD sound. No *huge* deal but it would be nice to use my 5.1 speakers.
I quickly loaded up the Visual Studio .NET 2003 installation (the only reason to run windows to begin with) and I found that the setup MSI wrapper does not allow installations on "64-bit operating systems". I know this is a load of bull because it will work fine with the dual Opty's, but I they will probably fix this when Wxp64 becomes retail and a future patch to VS.NET 2k3 installer gets applied. With sole exception of VS.NET2k3 everything worked GREAT.
So after that fiasco I pulled Wxp64 off there and loaded up Wxp32 pro. NOTHING was recognized. I to used my wife's computer to go get the 32-bit drivers for everything and entered the usual windows install/reboot loop for about the next 2 hours.
Once all the drivers were in place, I have a fully operational 32-bit workstation with VS.NET2K3 and all the trimmings of 5.1 sound, but that's NOT why I bought dual Opterons. Even though the dual procs where faster than my old workstation, I needed to feel 64-bit day to day computing.
Enter Linux. I've been using Gentoo for quite some time now, and of course that's the first distro I went to when I needed 64-bit linux. I found that the x86_64 stage's were experimental and I wasn't very excited about a crippled workstation. I tried to install gentoo64 on a single ext3 partition (from reading the docs they warned of Rieser and XFS problems) so I wanted to play it safe. Fast-forward about 3 days later and I had a completely non-functional system. Something happenend and even Windows was crapping all over the place.
So my experience with Gentoo64 wasn't so sweet, but I didn't give up. After my entire system was hosed I decided to rethink my partition setup. Ultimately I decided to dedicate the 36gb drive and a portion of the 120gb drive to windows, and do soft RAID-0 on the two 9gb's for linux. Getting the MD's to work under Gentoo64 was too much of a headache for even ME, so I decided maybe it was time to rethink my distro.
I switched to Suse 9.0. I've wanted to try out Suse for a long time now but I loved portage so much I never switched. Finding that Suse 9 reports a "production ready" x86_64 distribution I was thrilled at not being labeled "experimental" any more. The installation was awesome, it found everything in my system (including 64-bit drivers for my sound card and all my usb stuff!). This kicked Wxp64 out of the water.
Unfortunately when it came to actually copying the files I ran into some problems. Pretty much every file off the DVD's were "corrupted" when they were copied to disk and failed MD5 checksumming. I found that if I clicked retry enough times (read: about 20) things would install. I experienced this through both the Sony on the IDE channel and the Pioneer on the SCSI channel. I ended up having one of the kids build me some Lego hackery to hold down the Alt+E key. I set a spool of blank dvd's on top of it and left it "retrying" overnight on all the packages.
The next morning I awoke to a fully functional Suse 9.0 system. I just got Xinerma support working under KDE last night with the nVidia GLX and kernel modules (by default Suse didn't see my dual-headed setup bitching about not having two video cards). Everything is working great, and I'm very happy with my new system. Suse 9.0 was the easiest installation I've ever used.
Special thanks to all the part-time hackers that gave me 64-bit desktop computing! Happy holidays!