[WBEL-users] Motherboard recommendation required for an AMD64 FX53 Processor

[Milan Keršláger]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 01:38:12PM -0600, James Knowles wrote:
> 
> >>Please can someone recommend an AMD64 ... motherboard
> >>
> 
> I've mostly been watching from the sidelines, but every week or so have 
> googled for any new information. There isn't a lot. My interpretation is 
> that movement to AMD64 hasn't reached a critical point yet key 
> development people are really focusing on it.

I'm using AMD64 machine since RHEL3 has been out with no problems at all
(sure, there was instability with the beta Taroon kernel before RHEL3
was released).

I had two SATA discs so I tryed to made them work under own RHEL3
rebuild. I had troubles with VIA SATA chipset so I went to the store and
bought Silicon Image Sil3112 PCI SATA card for $20 or so.

I made the SATA working with legacy IDE built-in driver (siimage) on
original RHEL3 kernel (I think after U1 update or so) with poor
performance. I played with 2.6 kernel from Fedora and with Jeff Garzik's
patches for libata on 2.4 kernel. I was succesful but I was too lazy to
move user data from IDE to SATA.

Now there is U3 kernel with extended libata SATA support. I had to
recompile the kernel without siimage driver to made it work with libata
driver:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=118095

I know that on Intel ICH5 there is very good SATA support since U1 (or
so as I wrote about Sil chipset) with good performance.

I did not made tests on my Sil SATA discs but I will probably tomorow.

To close this question: There is no problem with running AMD64 clone in
enterprise environment on RHEL3 (or its clone). There are some troubles
with SATA but you are able to test Fedora Core 2 and use RHEL4 later
next year if you need 2.6. kernel with more libata SATA drivers. AMD64
is damm fast and cheap in compare to Intel (dual) CPU 32 bit servers.

-- 
                        Milan Kerslager
                        E-mail: milan.kerslager@pslib.cz
                        WWW:    http://www.pslib.cz/ke/