[NTLUG:Discuss] CPU History

[Darin Smith]

On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 19:10, Fred James wrote:
> Questions:
> (1) Is there any significant difference, from either a user's, or an 
> administrator's, perspective in Linux on AMD chips compared to Intel chips?
> (2) I usually run RH - any comments on this for AMD?
> (3) Any one distribution that stands out on AMD?
> Thanks in advance.
> 

I've run Linux on nothing but AMD processors since their 486 clones.

I've used a 486-66DX, 5x86, K6, K6-II, and now a 1.3 GHz Athlon.

Never once had a problem.  And now things are even better, since you can
select AMD as your processor architecture in your kernel compile, and
gcc supports squeezing more out of them.

As much success as I've had with them, I see no reason to spend the
vanity dollars on "Intel Inside" marketing crap.  I'm very impressed
with the fact that AMD really does their homework on their products
before rushing things out to market.

The only drawback to AMD has been the chipsets.  Some of the VIA
chipsets are buggy.  I bought a PCI UltraDMA ATA interface card to run
my CD drive off of, since ripping tracks from audio CD's was failing
miserably.  That cleared it right up.  That was with a VIA KT133 chipset
(early version, too).  Strangely, the older VIA VP2 chipset that my K6-2
was running on worked great...that was a great box.  But alas, I was
running a peltier on it (overclocked) and got a good humid
day...condensation and bye,bye motherboard and CPU.

As far as distributions go, anything should be fine.  I run Mandrake
with great success.  The "ultimate" would probably be to run gentoo,
where everything could be compiled with -mathlon and the 3DNow!
instructions used where possible.

In the past I have run RH, SuSE, and Mandrake on AMD hardware, with no
problem.

I'm itching for a dual Athlon MP 2400+...but I think I'm going to wait a
year and see if I can do something like:

dual Hammer (or whatever the release name is) at above 2 Ghz each
serial ATA drives (hopefully we'll have drives, not just controllers and
cables a year from now)
one of those a (hopefully serial ATA version of) Sony
DVD+RW/+R/-RW/-R/CD-RW/CD-R combo drive (if only it also did DVD-RAM!)
I figure by then I can throw in a couple or four 250GB drives -- a
terrabyte would be cool just for the novelty.
2GB Dual-channelled DDR RAM, if I can find a mobo that will do it.

I have had troubles with large amounts of RAM on my box though.  I've
got 1.5GB right now, kernel compiled for HIGHMEM=4G as suggested in the
notes, but I get "ldt allocation failed" often and one of my USB devices
has to vmalloc some 460K and can't do it.  I've emailed with Rik van
Riel, but as yet I don't have a good answer as to why the HIGHMEM bit
isn't working for me.

Everything's happy if I do mem=512M at boot, but I want my other 1GB!

--Darin