[WBEL-devel] Random AMD64 thoughts

[John Morris]

Been banging away on the new Athlon64 for a while now and have a few 
thoughts to share.

The boot disc/CD is i386, which means rescue mode is also 32bit, making it 
somewhat less than useful.  You have been warned.  :)

There is no mkbootdisk command on x86_64.  Contemplate this along with the 
above.

Just for grins I downloaded the preview of WinXP for AMD64.  It wouldn't
accept the partition I offered it (apparently DOS/NT/XP's Old Tech still
can't install onto an extended partition) but still trashed the MBR anyway
as a free courtesy.  See those two notes above and you might notice a
problem brewing......  You have been warned.  Hint, install the loader
into the partition instead of the MBR and you will win.  I had FC2T3
installed that way, chainloading off the copy of GRUB on the WBEL
partition.  I got back in by setting the FC partition's active flag,
whereupon DOS's bootloader would launch it.  Restoring things was then 
pretty straightforward.

Speaking of Fedora, it is looking good.

Finding the x86_64 kernel's secret boot argument "noexec=off
noexec32=off", without which gcc will refuse to build either a 32 or 64
bit package of itself, is certainly not something that is easy to
locate.....

A single consumer Athlon64 3200+ with half the memory and a consumer IDE
drive is churning out packages noticably faster than the enterprise grade
dual Xeon 2.4Ghz dual RAID5 SCSI monster the original WBEL releases were
built on last year.  Admittedly the build script I use isn't optimized at
all for SMP, but Intel should still be very afraid.

During long runs of heavy building the temp on the heatsink is going into 
the 40's and the CPU itself is crossing 50C.  This is with a retail CPU 
which includes AMD's approved heatsink & fan, in an all aluminum case with 
a boatload of fans, including a 120mm fan side mounted above the processor 
area.  Athlon64's are smoking fast, in both senses of the word.  I pity 
the fool with an Athlon64 powered laptop.

Not having kept up with the 3d world for a year or so, I didn't realise
none of ATI's halfway current product was supported by open drivers
anymore.  So I have an old Radeon 7000/VE stuck in a smoking 64 bit
machine just to get some 3D.  A pox on ATI's house.

A few i386 packages are required to build some x86_64 packages.

Now that the last of the showstopper glitches have been located, expect
some new helper scripts soon that will work on both i386 and x86_64 as 
soon as I clean up some final bits.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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