• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

linux on an Opteron system?

S

synapse02

Senior member
has anybody fired up an SK8N or opteron system as a linuxbox?
Any particular details i should know about?

Is it possible to dual boot with a disk array? I have dual boot systems on single drives but obviously never on a raid.

thanks
 
I think the only distro that will run in a mixed 64/32-bit mode is SuSe, unless RH released something recently. If you want a 32-bit only system any distro will work fine.

Dualbooting would work fine as long as the array is supported by the kernel, I know nothing about the board you're talking about so can't say if the controller is supported or not.
 
64bit windows enviroment is virtually impossibe given the state of the beta OS and lack of 64bit drivers, and there is no benefit that i know of
 
64bit windows enviroment is virtually impossibe given the state of the beta OS and lack of 64bit drivers, and there is no benefit that i know of
Click to expand...

Generally there's no benefit from a 64-bit system at all unless you're in a niche market that needs more than 4G of VM address space. The only people that really will use the 64-bit address space are people running databases, huge video renders, extremely huge picture edits, some email servers (mainly just exchange since it uses a database backend) and infact some things can slow down on 64-bit systems because of the overhead of the larger datatypes and page sizes.

That's not to say you won't see a performance increase, Opterons are generally faster just because of the chip itself and the extra cache on it. In 64-bit mode you also get a bunch more registers which can help too.
 
That's not to say you won't see a performance increase, Opterons are generally faster just because of the chip itself and the extra cache on it. In 64-bit mode you also get a bunch more registers which can help too.
Click to expand...


most of the reason i bought it, and i wanted to try something new..

 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
64bit windows enviroment is virtually impossibe given the state of the beta OS and lack of 64bit drivers, and there is no benefit that i know of
Click to expand...
Generally there's no benefit from a 64-bit system at all unless you're in a niche market that needs more than 4G of VM address space. The only people that really will use the 64-bit address space are people running databases, huge video renders, extremely huge picture edits, some email servers (mainly just exchange since it uses a database backend) and infact some things can slow down on 64-bit systems because of the overhead of the larger datatypes and page sizes. That's not to say you won't see a performance increase, Opterons are generally faster just because of the chip itself and the extra cache on it. In 64-bit mode you also get a bunch more registers which can help too.
Click to expand...

<sarcasm> yeah, and i bet people would never have imagined we would need the jump from 16 to 32 bit </sarcasm>
 
<sarcasm> yeah, and i bet people would never have imagined we would need the jump from 16 to 32 bit </sarcasm>
Click to expand...

That gave a lot more immediate benefits, I don't doubt 4G VM space will be necessary in the future but it's going to be quite a while because most apps still don't need more than a few hundred megs at most.
 
Originally posted by: eklass
Originally posted by: Nothinman
64bit windows enviroment is virtually impossibe given the state of the beta OS and lack of 64bit drivers, and there is no benefit that i know of
Click to expand...
Generally there's no benefit from a 64-bit system at all unless you're in a niche market that needs more than 4G of VM address space. The only people that really will use the 64-bit address space are people running databases, huge video renders, extremely huge picture edits, some email servers (mainly just exchange since it uses a database backend) and infact some things can slow down on 64-bit systems because of the overhead of the larger datatypes and page sizes. That's not to say you won't see a performance increase, Opterons are generally faster just because of the chip itself and the extra cache on it. In 64-bit mode you also get a bunch more registers which can help too.
Click to expand...

<sarcasm> yeah, and i bet people would never have imagined we would need the jump from 16 to 32 bit </sarcasm>
Click to expand...

16-bit systems can access what, 64kb ram? When I had a 386, it had 1 MB ram, or ~60x the previous limit. I don't think right now you see many people needing 60x4gb, or ~256 GB of ram. 16-bit numbers are also pretty small... if you had a 128kb file, you couldn't hold the size in 1 register.

edit: Nothinman beat me to it 🙂. The 386 was also the point where multitasking on the desktop really began to take off... so you could run multiple programs, all eating up some of your ram... the inadequacy of 64k is apparent. With the move to 64-bits, we aren't doing another jump from one job at a time to multiple...
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
<sarcasm> yeah, and i bet people would never have imagined we would need the jump from 16 to 32 bit </sarcasm>
Click to expand...

That gave a lot more immediate benefits, I don't doubt 4G VM space will be necessary in the future but it's going to be quite a while because most apps still don't need more than a few hundred megs at most.
Click to expand...

When you say 4G do you mean the 64bit windows OS? The opteron its self can address 256 terabytes of virtual memory, but I imagine there will be other limiting factors to prevent this number from being realized.

 
Edit: nm.. found my answer. (question was: which is better for everyday use: 64-bit processor, or a dual processor system?)
 
dual, no way I'm going UP on my workstation again. If I could I'd get a dual notebook and the only way I'm gonna get Opterons is when I can afford a dual setup.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top