Gentoo on the Opteron (x86-64)

JATMAN · Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 7:14 pm Post subject:

I suppose you're right, but I think the author of your reference would have had trouble with "regular x86". That guy couldn't get X installed and I know from experience that the installation of X using the AMD64 Live CD works fine.

I have X, KDE, Oracle 9.2, samba, apache, openldap, OpenOffice, KOffice, tightvnc and quite a few other apps installed and running stably.
_________________
Tyan (S2932)
Dual Opteron 2344HE quad-core processors
8GB RAM
Four 500GB SATA-II drives (7200 RPM) - RAID 0
3ware 9650SE controller

narensankar · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 Nov 2002 Posts: 109

Don't know where else to post this. But I am just setting up a Tyan Tomcat K8S based system. This is a single processor motherboard with dual BCM5705 GE. I have an Opteron 140 on this. I faced a few problems with the liveCD on this system. The first is due to ACPI. The Tomcat shipped to me with Bios Rev 1.03. However this rev does not have ACPI fully functional as far as I can tell. So the LiveCD hangs, and I had to use noacpi to boot the system. However Tyan does have bios rev 1.05 which fixes ACPI. So upgrade your Bios before you install or use gentoo kernel 2.6.

The second problem is that the tg3 driver is very flaky on this system. It does not reliably work everytime. The device is detected and the driver loaded, but DHCP fails. I am currently using the bcm57xx driver as this seems to be more stable on this platform. I installed Suse on this system originally. In Suse 9.0 the tg3 driver does not even load. So there is some in-compatibility. If you use static IP, the tg3 driver seems to work most of the time.

This system is blazingly fast using gentoo. I do not have emperical data, but I did a emerge -u system from the liveCD and updating gcc and glibc completed in 15 to 20 minutes. On my 750 Mhz PIII Laptop, this takes at least 2 hours or so. Both have 512M of memory.

Hope this helps someone.

Naren

JATMAN · Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2003 1:14 am Post subject:

One thing I noticed about the tg3 driver on my system (Tyan dual Opteron) is that if I used the bcm driver the assignment of the physical ethernet ports to eth0 and eth1 was backward compared to the tg3 driver. At first I thought the driver didn't work, and then I realized that it had simply brought the other port up as eth0.

JATMAN
_________________
Tyan (S2932)
Dual Opteron 2344HE quad-core processors
8GB RAM
Four 500GB SATA-II drives (7200 RPM) - RAID 0
3ware 9650SE controller

npg · Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2005 9:30 am Post subject:

Hmpf -- for a optimzied and tweaked to the max system my choice of compiler would never be gcc. It scores pretty bad when it comes to generating highly performant code. Most optimizations above -O2 have been horrendously broken for years -- often resulting in SLOWER code.

The yummy compilers to try are icc and, of course, the SUN compiler.

HTH

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Nicolai Guba
SONY Computer Entertainment Europe, Studio Liverpool
http://www.wipeoutpure.com