Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 09:02:39 -0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> To: "Joel V." <joel@almic.ee>, <freebsd-amd64@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: 5.2 and amd64 - good enough for a production server? Message-ID: <200312150902.39091.peter@wemm.org> In-Reply-To: <000201c3c2a4$07423370$1900a8c0@CHARON> References: <000201c3c2a4$07423370$1900a8c0@CHARON>
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On Sunday 14 December 2003 04:40 pm, Joel V. wrote: > Just making sure I understand everything, before I go to my boss and tell > him to buy a 4000$ opteron box. =) If you have the time, what I actually suggest is that you get hold of a smaller configuration machine and have a tinker first. That also gives you a place to experiment first before going live with stuff anyway. > 1) All the ports are working fine? I can go to /usr/ports/x and make > install clean and I got myself a 64-bit binary working on a 64-bit > operating system? (I'm mainly interested in Apache, qmail, vpopmail, > proftpd and samba, which are quite essential to have.) All the ports? No. Not all the ports even work on the i386 version of 5.x. It does have a few that are broken because of 64-bit issues, but it isn't all that far behind i386. All the ones that you mentioned above are quite OK for example though. > 2) AMD64 version of 5.2 will support the same amount of hardware than i368 > version? The most important area of support being RAID controllers, for me > at least. (Adaptec SCSI for booting and system disks, 3ware ATA for > dedicated backup disks. Oh, and what about RAID management tools?) The only major chunk of hardware that I know of that has big issues is the Promise SX6000. The driver tries to use a 32 bit field in a hardware data structure to store a 64 bit pointer. Just about everything else works (or can be made to work) though. What raid tools are you looking for? If you mean things like aaccli, 3dmd, etc, I haven't tried them. The 32 bit binaries might work. > 3) Last but not least - 32-bit compatibility? I know Linux binary > compatibility, both 32-bit and 64-bit is NOT DONE, but when will it be? > Will it take a month, half a year or more? Its not a matter of life and > death, but it would be good to know. And as far as I understand, at this > moment I cannot also run 32-bit FreeBSD binaries from earlier 5.x releases? FreeBSD/i386 binary compatability is a bit green at the moment. It works for a good number of smaller userland applications (I use it for the i386 perforce client, for example) but it is not likely to work for system level binaries. ie: you can't yet take an amd64 kernel and boot an installed i386 system with it. However, being able to do this is a definate goal. Or at least run it inside a chroot/jail/etc. cvsup still breaks for reasons that I do not understand... that one has got me completely stumped. The 32 bit emulation code does not have the FreeBSD-3.x and earlier compatability system calls implemented yet. It will not run older 3.x binaries. Certainly not a.out binaries either. I wouldn't like to guestimate a timeline for the linux stuff though. There are a number of things I want to be able to run so it'll happen sometime soon. (eg: acrobat reader) > Please be not offended by my outrageously newbie-esque questions. Dont forget that an opteron machine makes a Damn Fine i386 machine. My personal experiences suggest that an opteron gives an equivalent xeon system a good run for its money. If it turns out you're not ready for 5.x yet, you still can run 4.9/i386 on it, and it'll work very very well. It might seem a bit silly to consider this, but you do have a viable choice. Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
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