[NTLUG:Discuss] OT: Dual P4 motherboards?

[Kelledin]

On Wednesday 17 December 2003 12:51 am, Robert Citek wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 16, 2003, at 11:43  PM, Kelledin wrote:
> > As it is, I tend to recommend Opterons over Xeons these
> > days. Intel's Xeon is flat-out getting slaughtered by
> > Opteron lately.
>
> How do you like those Opterons?  Any growing pains going from
> 32-bit to 64-bit?  What is your distro of choice?

SuSE Linux works all right (SuSE is one of the nicest pre-rolled 
distro IMO), but i'm a LinuxFromScratch man at heart.  Currently 
there's an effort underway to get LFS working on Opteron.

Beware, though...Linux 2.4 doesn't support 32-under-64 all that 
well on AMD64.  GinGin64 (Redhat's AMD64 port) actually lacked a 
32-bit virtual machine last I checked.  2.6 is supposed to do a 
lot better in that regard, though.

As for porting...there aren't too many issues with porting that 
didn't already get addressed on other arches, like Alpha.  Even 
if you have an app that isn't 64-bit clean, you can probably 
just compile it with gcc -m32.  Some apps are actually faster 
that way (!).

Once the kernel and toolchain is off the ground, the rest comes 
pretty easy.

-- 
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does 
it still cost four figures to fix?"