What is the best OS for multiple processors?

[BatmanNate]

I thought that I'd generalize the subject a little bit to get a variety of opinions. Here is the background info:

I am running a Compaq Proliant 5000 with 4 PPro 200MHz 512k processors, 512mb RAM, and a SMART Array SCSI RAID controller. This machine will be used for a gateway/Webserver/FTPserver.

I am considering the following OS's that I have used with 2 processor configs, but never with 4:

SME 5.5: This is a brilliant package built on Redhat that is easy to administer. Tough to find specific support for, however. Buggy.

Redhat 8: The choice linux for this application probably, as Compaq used to ship with Redhat 6.1 for this server, IIRC. Probably the best driver support. I did read on USENET that isntalling this on the Proliant is difficult due to the BIOS misreporting memory and the RAID controller not having drivers.

FreeBSD 4.7: My favorite server OS, although a little more difficult to configure and very picky hardware support.

Win2k Advanced Server: Slow and problematic EVERY time I use it. It would be nice as I could run a richer featured FTP server and use terminal services, but it is SLOW, unstable, and vulnerable. Good driver support though.


Has anybody run a Proliant 5000 before, and if so, what OS did you use? Also, which OS has the finest tuned Kernel for 4 way SMP?

 

[BatmanNate]

Added poll, for fun.

 

[Nothinman]

FreeBSD has 1 big kernel lock which serializes most of it's internal work to 1 CPU, if you have a lot of CPU intensive apps you won't probably notice but anything I/O intensive will basically be wasting a CPU. This should be fixed in 5.0, if it ever gets released =)
OpenBSD has no SMP support.
NetBSD SMP support is quit new IIRC, and they're emphasis is on portability not speed.
I wouldn't recommend SCO for anything.
NT 4 is pretty outdated, not sure how well it would scale to 4 CPUs.
Win2K and XP should scale pretty well, but I have no data to back that up.
Solaris x86 should scale well, hell it needs 2 CPUs on x86 just to be usable =)

All the Linuxes will be about the same, except maybe RedHat Advanced Server but you can't download that IIRC.

I'm a big Debian zealot, I have it on every one of my boxes, although none of them are quad CPU yet.

 

[BatmanNate]

Nothinman,

Thanks for the info! I've run FreeBSD 4.5 on my dual P2 and haven't noticed too much improvement from a single P2 setup, so I can see what you're saying. SCO was supposedly mated with the Proliant 5000 from Compaq as an option, however I've heard horror stories myself. Redhat 6.1 was also, and I'm fairly familiar with it, relative to the other distros. Perhaps you can enlighten me to some of the Debian advantages, I've never used it.

 

[Nothinman]

Perhaps you can enlighten me to some of the Debian advantages, I've never used it.

It's not one thing (although many people used to say 'apt' but that points moot now that you can download apt4rpm), it's the whole Debian infrastructure. After you've used it a while and figured out how everything works, you won't want to use any other Linux distro. Using RedHat is a nearly painfull experience now that I've gotten used to Debian.

 

[manly]

Just to reiterate what Nothinman said, I have no numbers to pimp, but any Linux 2.4 distro and W2K are the best of your choices as far as SMP scalability on a 4-way x86 box. The upcoming Windows .NET Server based on the WXP kernel is not too viable on 3+ year old hardware. For the record, NT 4.0 SMP scalability was reportedly pretty lousy.

Irix and Solaris (on bigger boxes) are known to have world-class scalability in absolute terms, but Solaris x86 is a rare choice these days.

For what you said you want to do, Linux sounds like a great choice.
As for Debian Linux, their development model tends towards stability rather than convenience or bleeding-edge desktop PC features. For that reason, it's known to be an excellent server OS. I've never personally owned an SMP box, so take my opinions with the standard grain of salt.

 

[Nothinman]

As for Debian Linux, their development model tends towards stability rather than convenience or bleeding-edge desktop PC features. For that reason, it's known to be an excellent server OS

It works great on my dual Athlon Desktop too. Not everything is the latest version but most things are new enough, I have Evolution 1.0.8, Gnome2, Gkrellm2, Galeon 1.2.6 (1.3 in develepment is available) and more. Some big things like KDE3 are held back because Debian recently started the migration from gcc 2.95.x to gcc 3.x and with that comes a lot of C++ ABI changes so everything written in C++ (most notably KDE and QT) must be recompiled to work properly and it's not smart to do that until the migration is complete.

There are >11,000 packages in Debian unstable right now on 11 architectures, it takes a lot to keep them all up to date, especially older ones like m68k that take forever to auto-build.

 

[mikecel79]

We had a Proliant 5000 that was our old file server at work. Since we were retiring it we took it and put in our IT lab and now use for an admin terminal/ghosting machine/work PC. Ours is only a dual PPro 200 (we will be adding 2 more CPUs next week), 512MB, Compaq 3200 Smart RAID card, and an external drive cage with 4 18GB drives in RAID5 and 4 4.3GB drives in the interal cage.

We are running Win2k Server on it and while it doesn't scream it works fairly well. However like you said it's FTP server is kinda lacking in features. It's been stable (like all of our Win2k servers) and Terminal Services works great.

 

[ultimatebob]

I'd give my vote to Windows 2000 Advanced Server, IF you have a license for it. I've found that it scales nicely to quad processors, and I like Terminal Services better than either VNC or remote X Windows for remote administration. There are also plenty of third-party FTP servers for it, as well.

 

[Buddha Bart]

manly said:

any Linux 2.4 distro and W2K are the best of your choices as far as SMP scalability on a 4-way x86 box.

Thats pretty much your answer in a nutshell. Between them, its up to you.

bart

 

[BatmanNate]

Thanks for all the input, guys. For some reason, installing Linux on this machine is problematic due to the BIOS misreporting the memory to the OS. This happens with different distros and is documented on various forums, however no one has posted the solution. (Only that some have figured it out) The machine has 512mb of ram, but Linux will only see 6 or 12 mb of it. Any ideas? I might try Win2k Server with RASPPPOE again and see if it solves my ICS difficulties, but linux would doubtlessly be faster and more stable. Decisions, decisions....

 

[Nothinman]

If you boot Linux with 'mem=512M' parameter does that help? It should tell Linux "look , I have 512M of memory, trust me" and Linux will ignore what the BIOS says it has.

 

[BatmanNate]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
If you boot Linux with 'mem=512M' parameter does that help? It should tell Linux "look , I have 512M of memory, trust me" and Linux will ignore what the BIOS says it has.

How do you do that when you're booting from the CD?

 

[Nothinman]

The CD loads a Linux kernel just like when booting from the hard disk. I'm not sure if the CD uses LILO or GRUB though.

If it's LILO (you should have a lilo: prompt or a pretty picture that says something like 'Press X for command line'. Just type 'linux mem=512M' and see what happens.

If it's GRUB you can hit 'e' on the entry to edit it, then add mem=512M to the end of the boot command line (usually the second line).

 

[bromer]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Perhaps you can enlighten me to some of the Debian advantages, I've never used it.

It's not one thing (although many people used to say 'apt' but that points moot now that you can download apt4rpm), it's the whole Debian infrastructure. After you've used it a while and figured out how everything works, you won't want to use any other Linux distro. Using RedHat is a nearly painfull experience now that I've gotten used to Debian.

Yes.. Redhat isn't very good. But I wouldn't say that Debian was the best. I use FreeBSD and love the concept of having a sourcetree. As I understand Debian havn't god this.. But gentoo have.. I would use gentoo

 

[Nothinman]

As I understand Debian havn't god this.. But gentoo have.. I would use gentoo

You understand very wrong.

 

[bromer]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

As I understand Debian havn't god this.. But gentoo have.. I would use gentoo

You understand very wrong.

I can't find any information about Debian having a sourcetree you can use. Having a sourcetree is NOT the same as having the source for the programs!

 

[BatmanNate]

It's definately not Lilo, I'll give the 'E' thing a try. Thanks for the heads up.

Also, to reiterate, I love FreeBSD, but that's not practical here because it won't support my hardware and apparently doesn't scale well.

 

[bromer]

Originally posted by: BatmanNate
It's definately not Lilo, I'll give the 'E' thing a try. Thanks for the heads up.

Also, to reiterate, I love FreeBSD, but that's not practical here because it won't support my hardware and apparently doesn't scale well.

Yes.. it's a shame that FreeBSD don't support more hardware. Maybe one should begin to hack the kernel. Now I just need the time