Re: Installation on SGI Altix 350
On 1 Apr 2004, at 12:11, Andreas U. Trottmann wrote:
So, does anyone have any hints? First for the kernel; is it just the
case that the debian kernel won't work on the altix? Does it have a
different memory map than others, which generates the relocation
problem?
Oh yes, and then some. The architecture of the Altix is really very
different from other Itanium2 machines. It uses SGI's own chips for
the interconnects, and even if it booted, a generic kernel wouldn't
know about the NUMA topology of the machine, so the performance would
most likely be very poor.
The scheduler in SGI's kernel that they supply you with is supposed to
have a completely rewritten scheduler to understand the NUMA
architecture.
And second for the "trying to overwrite": Is it possible to somewhere
put a "force-overwrite" in order to get the current sarge state
installed at all?
I really don't think there's much point in doing what you're trying to
do - lovely though Debian is, the performance is going to be very poor
without SGI's kernel modifications, and that's assuming you get it to
work at all.
Tim
--
Dr Tim Cutts
Informatics Systems Group
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
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