Re: Q: About the AMD32/64 support with Skolelinux/Debian-Edu
* Knut Yrvin
| onsdag 28. juli 2004, 15:31, skrev Gavin McCullagh:
| > * Xeons are recommended (if I've translated the Norwegian hardware page
| > correctly) and Athlon MPs are not so. What is the opinion on Opterons
| > in 32-Bit mode?
|
| Older AMD Athlons MP processors had stability problems. The new Opteorns
| don't have this problems. But we don't know about any schools that has
| tested Opterons in day-to-day use yet. We really want teachers to tell us
| if they has some experience whit this.
I have a bit of experience with both the Athlon MPs and the current
Opterons. Earlier, if you didn't have a good enough PSU and not enough
cooling, the MPs were notoriously unstable. Those problems were fixed
fairly fast. The opterons use a lot less power and don't have any heat
problems I know of at least.
As you know, the Opterons are 64 bit processors with the ability to run
32 bit code at fairly good speed. Skolelinux doesn't support amd64 (as
the arch is called), yet, so you will be stuck with running the
processors in 32 bit mode. While this isn't a problem per se, I've had
quite a bit of problems with one of my systems in 32 bit mode. It had
big stability problems which mean that after 12-24 hours of heavy load,
the system just died completely and had to be rebooted.
Therefore, I would not recommend to go with Opteron systems at the
moment, unless you are comfortable with recompiling kernels and such
yourself. As Knut says -- stability is of chief importance, and my
experience with Opterons in 32 bit mode doesn't speak too well of their
stability. Of course, I could just have been unlucky with the hardware
I used.
Once we have amd64 support for Skolelinux, I would heartily recommend
the hardware as they are quite nice and good to work with. :)
--
Tollef Fog Heen ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' :
`. `'
`-
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