Which OS for quad processor P2-Xeon server???

[DaFinn]

Got in a trade NCR branded quad PII-400Mhz Xeon server. Don't really know what to do with it yet, but I'll figure somethin

Anyways, NOT going to shell cash for any Windows variant that does 4 processors. Any Linux variant that does 4 processors? Prolly gonna set it up as a picture hosting/FTP server.

Recommendations welcome!

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[drag]

Any Linux distro can handle 4 cpu's fine. Especially ones with the 2.6 series kernel which has vastly improved scedualling over the 2.4 series kernels.

I think that it would be able to handle 16-way or 32-way system easily... SGI even sells a Intanium2 box with 512 cpus in it that runs linux, although I'd bet that they have some funky patches to the kernel that would allow good performance at those high numbers of cpus (that's a single image machine, not a cluster, btw)

The only thing you have to look for is the kernel version your using. SMP-enabled kernels incure a slight overhead in performance when used on a single cpu machine so most of the time the SMP support is disabled at compile time. So you may have a kernel package named kernel-2.6.9.whatever and then a second one named kernel-2.6.9-SMP.whatever, you want to make sure that your using the SMP version.

generally this is detected automaticly on install time and the SMP version is selected. Although it won't be long until all kernels will be smp enabled since you would use it on multicores or any intel proccessor that supports hyperthreading.

To check to see if you have support for it check out files in the /proc directory like /proc/cpuinfo and also tools like "top" or "gnome-system-monitor" should indicate the load on each individual cpu.

Shouldn't be a issue.

 

[DaFinn]

Thanks!

Just DL Ubuntu the other day. Guess I'm going to give it a try.

 

[uOpt]

If you want to tell it, give me a P.M. Depends on how large and power consumptious it is, of course.

Any Linux or FreeBSD will work fine. if you want good performance you need Linux kernel 2.6 or FreeBSD 5.x. Earlier Linux kernels and FreeBSD's don't scale too well over processors.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
If you want to tell it, give me a P.M. Depends on how large and power consumptious it is, of course.

Any Linux or FreeBSD will work fine. if you want good performance you need Linux kernel 2.6 or FreeBSD 5.x. Earlier Linux kernels and FreeBSD's don't scale too well over processors.

Linux has done great on 4 way boxes even back to the 2.2 days. I had a 4-way PPro a few years ago that ran RedHat 6.2 ... it scaled very well. Going beyond that to some of the bigger iron- 8+ cpu's wasn't so good back then.

 

[Nothinman]

if you want good performance you need Linux kernel 2.6 or FreeBSD 5.x. Earlier Linux kernels and FreeBSD's don't scale too well over processors.

Nah, Linux 2.4 would do fine. It may slow down under extreme load, but I would guess that those CPUs, or disk or network speed would be a bottleneck first. No doubt Linux 2.6 is better, but I doubt the benefits on a machine with only 4 CPUs would be that great.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Linux, FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD (2.0), and OpenBSD all support multiple processors. They're also free (to varying degrees, some are more free than others). NetBSD and linux are probably the most scalable (according to some flawed tests a while back), but Dragonfly is the most promising, IMO.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

if you want good performance you need Linux kernel 2.6 or FreeBSD 5.x. Earlier Linux kernels and FreeBSD's don't scale too well over processors.

Nah, Linux 2.4 would do fine. It may slow down under extreme load, but I would guess that those CPUs, or disk or network speed would be a bottleneck first. No doubt Linux 2.6 is better, but I doubt the benefits on a machine with only 4 CPUs would be that great.

That's about right. Anything above 4 cpus you definately want 2.6 though. IBM has some results here from QA testing they do on Linux kernels. It shows the results of the number of static pages served out of a Apache service on a 8-way SMP machine. Simply changing from 2.4 to a early 2.6 series kernel on the same OS showed a 600% increase in performance. (Obviously not a realistic benchmark, though.)

But your not going to see anywere near that improvement in a 4-way box. The differences between a 2.4 and 2.6 in that would probably be fairly small, except on very heavy loads I am guessing.

 

[uOpt]

To evaluate how "good" your kernel needs to be (i.e. whether you need Linux 2.4 or 2.6), you have to know whether your application spends its time burning CPU in userspace, or whether a good chunk of time is spend in I/O and other systemcalls.

Linux-2.4 and FreeBSD 4.x will effectivly not do anything in parallel once you enter the kernel. That means 4 processes just doing compuation on a four-processor machine work fine on the older kernels. But 4 apaches on a 4-processor box basically dont do anything better than one processor.