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

[Amit Joshi]

Hello,

My two cents worth:

Machine: White box (!) machine with an ASUS motherboard (A8V Deluxe if I
remember rightly) with the AMD64. IDE drive and SATA hard disks on the
Promise Raid controller.
OS: I tried Suse 9.0 and WhiteBox Respin 1 (with all the updates I could
find + a bunch of x86 packages).

My results for WhiteBox:
- Could not get the Gigabit ethernet adapter to get going. I gave up and
installed a cheap PCI Realtek based card.
- The ISOs would not recognize the SATA drives or the Raid controller
(Promise). After some tinkering around I realized that the modules for the
SATA stuff are not compiled by default. I recompiled the kernel (the config
file was in /boot - else the kernel does not compile). Once I had all the
modules compiled and loaded the drives were fine.
- I had an nVidia card which means that EVERY TIME I tweak the kernel I have
to reinstall the drivers (since they come as a binary package that is kernel
version specific).
- I needed to install a bunch of the x86 packages (downloaded from the
WhiteBox site directly) in order to get Oracle installed. Some needed to be
installed with --force. My gripe here is that "rpm -q -a | grep glibc" for
instance lists the packages twice (once for the x86 and once for the x86_64
version) but beyond that I cannot seem to be able to get the package manager
to differentiate the two packages which are only different in architecture
(i386 vs x86_64). I am probably missing some option to rpm here.

Suse Linux results:
- I installed from the free download (made a copy on the hard disk and then
installed from there).
- All the hardware was recognized and worked straight from the install.
- Oracle however would not install - it apparently requires some older
versions of glibc etc and will not link on Suse. I am told that people have
a work around for this - I was not able to get any success.

Both installations:
- Other stuff such as java, JBoss, seems to work well on both installations
I also tried the Blackdown AMD64 java and that seems to work well too -
there was a noticiable difference when starting JBoss - the BlackDown AMD64
was faster. But Oracle does not like the AMD64 java at all.

I have been quite happy with the approach of keeping the OS on the IDE and
plan to keep the database on the SATA disks configured for software RAID. I
am not sure why I would want to move the boot stuff to the SATA/RAID side -
is the performance differential worth the hassle and headache? There are
tons of tools and rescue disks that seem to work with the IDE side as is.

My conclusion: the AMD64 (at least for Oracle) is very fast and worth the
switch. Suse Linux seemsed to be faster and more uptodate, but WhiteBox
linux (old though the kernel and the packages are) seems to be the best bet
to get a stable system - there seems to be more support for both free and
proprietary software for RHEL 3 (which is what WhiteBox essentially is).
There are a number of rough edges to going to an x86_64 platform - however
the Whitebox system does allow you to run 32bit software too!

Hope this helps,

Amit Joshi

-----Original Message-----
From: whitebox-users-admin@beau.org
[mailto:whitebox-users-admin@beau.org]On Behalf Of Milan Kerslager
Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 5:47 PM
To: whitebox-users@beau.org
Subject: Re: [WBEL-users] Motherboard recommendation required for an
AMD64 FX53 Processor


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/
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