A journey in installing on Itanium2.... (on a hp rx4610)

[pc]

first: sorry for using your header, too, friedmud, but i thought it would fit just nice, cause i depended on your info while installing the rx4610.

ok, lets got:

just like friedmud i got an itanium on my new job including 2x800mhz with 8gb ram and 2x18gb 160 scsi drives (without a hw-raid-controller... and that in a 20.000$ database machine.. [hp, what were u thinking???])

but cause of software-raid, it doesnt really matter ))

going on: after some trouble with a malfunctioning memory board (congratulations to the hp support, it just took 24hrs and a new mem-board was installed [without any costs...]) the ia got up into the efi shell.

cause no os was pre-installed (to be more precise: there were some rathead ia64 pre-installed, but the hp-worker screwed it up while doing some tests with the malfunction mem-board [rathead was installed on a ext2 drive *grin*])

i just put a mandrake ia64 iso into and began installing it.
the installtation went without flaws and after appr. 40 minutes i got a root shell with all hardware attached (very nice installer->mandrake-guys)

the only bad thing about the mandrake iso is, that it just supports ext2, but 'cause i just needed it for installing gentoo, it had to be enough.

after downloading the ia-stage1via lynx, i started the install like written in the gentoo-docs.

like friedmud, there were no problems while 'bootstrap'ing' or 'emerging system' and so i continued to the needed system-deamons like metalog and vcron.

while metalog went without problems, i got the same error about a masked virtual/mta which i solved emerging ssmtp manually and then vcron (which worked after that...?
i can't explain it... [should'nt portage emerge ssmtp automatically when vcron depends on it??? i'm just a linux/gentoo beginner, so i dont now if i'm wrong about this... ])

after some little trouble with numa (like friedmud) i got a working kernel.
after that, i also just re-wrote the mandrake-elilo-conf to boot gentoo
which worked like a charm...

and there i am:

got a working (means booting) gentoo-ia64 )))


cause my boss talked so much about the "high-performance" itanium i started some mysql-database benchmarks with it and were very disappointed:

compared to our 2x2ghz p4 xeon (1gb 800mhz rambus, 320scsi raid 5 using 3 disks) the ia was very slow....
the xeon was at least double as fast like the ia (incl. optimized my.conf. for the 8gb ram on the ia)

so there my question comes up:

why does an itanium cost over 20.000$, if a 4000$ dual xeon is faster?

i did some research about the itanium and all i found was, that the processor-development-team is the previous alpha-cpu-team.

but, is this all?
does the name do the price?

this can't be true, or???

please, i need some advice from an itanium-guru:
whats the special about ia? (ok, it really compiles fast, but this cant be all, or??)
where's my mistake?
why is it 'so slow'?
is it cause of the missing numa? (i need to do some research about numa, cause i don't really know what it means)


that's all about my journey into installing on itanium2


special thanks go to friedmud, without your help i would stil be stuck at:
make dep && make compressed !!!!!

what a goddamn (*#$&*@$&)
why is it named compressed and not bzImage ?????

some url/further info would be appreciated )


and a very special thank goes to the gentoo-developers for doing such a great port )


I LOVE GENTOO LINUX ))))

keep on reading friedmuds journey, too:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=110127&highlight=itanium