Scott and All,Ok, I don't know if this is the most appropriate question for this list, but I was just wondering if you [Scott, or anybody else who wishes] could give me a general description of your experience running a Dual Opteron system. I'm seriously looking into purchasing that sort of system and I'm trying to answer the general question, "Is it worth it?" (they're sort of pricey, as you know!) Anyway, what kind of performance gains are you seeing, especially with the 64-bit kernel and 64-bit apps? The main thing I'm interested in doing is 3d modeling/rendering (blender), and film editing and compositing (cinepaint, cinarella, jahshaka, gimp). So, large memory size ("large" as in at least a gig of physical RAM and at least that large of swapfile) and large file sizes, with rendering and batch processing and so on. Do you think 64-bit will be a big advantage when all these apps are optimized for it (if they aren't already)?
Oh, and I am especially interested in how your RAID situation works out, as I would be interested in some sort of RAID setup myself.
Thanks for putting up with a newbie's questions! Take care, - Josh Hansen Scott Ransom wrote:
Hi All, So I made the plunge. I installed a semi-recent Debian unstable on a new dual Opteron 244 on a Tyan 2880 board and then installed Bart's newest 64 bit kernel (2.4.23-pre5-amd64) and some key 64 bit debs from Barts site. Things seem OK. I can compile and run 64 bit apps just fine. But now I'm having some problems with my 3Ware RAID card and ext3 (and possible NFS). I believe they are kernel related issues and want to post to LKML with them. But first, I wanted to get a brief rundown on how recent or what x86-64 updates have been applied to the 2.4.23-pre5 kernel. Is this using a x86-64.org CVS kernel as base? Thanks a bunch. You'll probably be seeing my name on the board quite a bit in the weeks following... Scott