On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 10:11:40PM +0200, David Garnier wrote:
I'm in the market for a new Java workstation, so I'm looking at bi-Xeons and bi-Opterons. Now here is the catch: I do not have lots of time to spend on coding, and even less time on tinkering my setup, so my workstation must _just_ work. That's why I'm running SuSE: it just work almost without any maintenane.
Now, I've been reading this mailing-list for a while, and it seems that AMD64 users are having a rough ride. Kernel lockups, JVM segfaults... Are those common ? Or is it just the usual 'background noise' ?
I think one of the reason there are so many kernel lockup problems reported is that Opteron systems tend to have much more memory than other systems (and they're picky in their DIMMs too). The more DIMMs you have the more likely is that a bad DIMM is included. A lot of reported problems are simply hardware problems like that. One way to avoid such problems is to not assemble a box yourself, but buy a tested complete system from some vendor. Another common source of problems is Cool'n'quiet on A64, but that's near always buggy BIOS. Opteron doesn't have C'n'Q, so there are no such issues there. The upcomming kernels will have better sanity checking on BIOS C'n'Q tables, so hopefully a few lockups with C'n'Q that were reported will be gone too. Of course there are some other issues too like in all software, but overall it's quite usable.
I'm pretty sure that Opterons are, long-term, a better platform than Xeons. But my question is: does it _just_ work _right_ now?
It works fine for a lot of people. However satisfied users don't usually post to mailing lists.
If Suse 9.1 for AMD64 is still a tad bumpy, can I just install SuSE 9.1 for x32 and expect flawless operation (I don't know if that question really make sense, so please be kind) ? Then I could get an bi-Opteron,
Yes, 32bit SUSE should work fine on these systems too. For 9.1 it's even on the same DVD. -Andi