On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 05:56 am, you wrote:

Does anyone know details which Suse will perform better on this kind of hardware? (CPU & RAM - not so much disk IO) Does opensuse 10.0 AMD64 default Kernel support 32 GB and 4 CPUs out of the box? I read that SLEs supports 512 CPUs on Itanium but this "technical" document manages to miss all other important details (http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseserver/features.html) . I would like to avoid recompiling Kernels after each online update. Is that MegaRaid320-1 supported by both?

CPU: Quad AMD Opteron 854 (2.8 GHz, 1MB L2 Cache) RAM: 32GB (16 x 2GB) DDR400 Registered ECC PCI-X (133MHz) 1: LSI MegaRAID SCSI 320-1 - 1 Channel U320 RAID 64MB CACHE 2 x 10KRPM SCSI RAID1

My system is a Tyan S2892 Thunder K8SE with Dual 270 Opteron CPU's (with Dual Core = Quad CPU's) + 4GB Memory DDR400 Reg ECC (128Bit wide interleaving) + 3Ware controllers (133MHz) PCI-X slots with WD SATA2 - 800GB disks. SuSE 10.0 + Updates. SuSE 10.0 runs out of the box - Now problems 64 bit wise. I did however [for personal preferences] rebuild the kernel and modules just for Kernel Core preemptive scheduling. As my system is used as a workstation more so than a dedicated server. System flys and I am are very happy with SuSE on it. We have been SuSE users since SuSE 6.2. On the MegaRaid Support under Linux (SuSE) the quote from /usr/src/linux/Documentation/scsi/megaraid.txt says: :::Quote::: Different classes of controllers from LSI Logic, accept and respond to the user applications in a similar way. They understand the same firmware control commands. Furthermore, the applications also can treat different classes of the controllers uniformly. Hence it is logical to have a single module that interefaces with the applications on one side and all the low level drivers on the other. ... Design: The Common Management Module is implemented in megaraid_mm.[ch] files. This module acts as a registry for low level hba drivers. The low level drivers (currently only megaraid) register each controller with the common module. The applications interface with the common module via the character device node exported by the module. The lower level drivers now understand only a new improved ioctl packet called uioc_t. The management module converts the older ioctl packets from the older applications into uioc_t. After driver handles the uioc_t, the common module will convert that back into the old format before returning to applications. As new applications evolve and replace the old ones, the old packet format will be retired. Common module dedicates one uioc_t packet to each controller registered. This can easily be more than one. But since megaraid is the only low level driver today, and it can handle only one ioctl, there is no reason to have more. But as new controller classes get added, this will be tuned appropriately. :::Unquote::: So it appears Linux/SuSE supports all MegaRaid controllers using this single device driver module. -- Hope this assists you. Cheers. Grahame