Dear All,
I have previous posted on here before about some of the problems I have been have with various services in 4.1 particularly, PCMCIA, XFS, and Netowrk. I have a nf4x mobo with an amd semprom 3000+. The video card is an Asus radeon x500 (uses the x300 drivers). I have also tried fedora core 4 as well which the same repeatable results. Basically the problem is the services freeze when they start up, but if I removed them from init.d the computer starts fine and they start fine manually. Yet, when I get going I have several various ata errors, and lets not even think about running gnome which just locks up and hangs. My question is: is the hardware support for x86_64 as good as i386. I just installed i386 4.1 without a hang or any problems.
thanks
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 19:40 -0500, Ryan Lum wrote:
Dear All,
I have previous posted on here before about some of the problems I have been have with various services in 4.1 particularly, PCMCIA, XFS, and Netowrk. I have a nf4x mobo with an amd semprom 3000+. The video card is an Asus radeon x500 (uses the x300 drivers). I have also tried fedora core 4 as well which the same repeatable results. Basically the problem is the services freeze when they start up, but if I removed them from init.d the computer starts fine and they start fine manually. Yet, when I get going I have several various ata errors, and lets not even think about running gnome which just locks up and hangs. My question is: is the hardware support for x86_64 as good as i386. I just installed i386 4.1 without a hang or any problems.
Personally, if I was going to run a server, I would use the x86_64 distro ... but if I was going to run a workstation, I would use the i386 distro.
The x86_64 distro has the same packages, just compiled a different way. Not all packages are x86_64, and some items are only available via i386. These i386 packages have been included in the x86_64 distro. (see openoffice.org as an example).
One thing you can try to make the x86_64 more stable:
1. It is very important that you have the latest BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer. This is especially true with boards that support SATA.
To be perfectly honest, if i386 is stable for you and x86_64 is not, I would recommend you use the i386 distro ... in my experience, the difference between the two is not really that noticeable when using the system.
Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 19:40 -0500, Ryan Lum wrote:
<snipped>
My question is: is the hardware support for
x86_64 as good as i386. I just installed i386 4.1 without a hang or any problems.
Personally, if I was going to run a server, I would use the x86_64 distro ... but if I was going to run a workstation, I would use the i386 distro. To be perfectly honest, if i386 is stable for you and x86_64 is not, I would recommend you use the i386 distro ... in my experience, the difference between the two is not really that noticeable when using the system.
<snipped>
So then, can anyone point me to documentation or experience that would lead one to choose x86_64 over i386 on a workstation or desktop? Perceived or otherwise performance gains would be nice, I'm just looking for some "why" type stuff if anyone would like to share their experience and or decision making scenarios with me. This can be done off list or on maybe it would benefit some others?
Sincerely,
Alex White
Alex White wrote:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 19:40 -0500, Ryan Lum wrote:
<snipped>
My question is: is the hardware support for
x86_64 as good as i386. I just installed i386 4.1 without a hang or any problems.
Personally, if I was going to run a server, I would use the x86_64 distro ... but if I was going to run a workstation, I would use the i386 distro. To be perfectly honest, if i386 is stable for you and x86_64 is not, I would recommend you use the i386 distro ... in my experience, the difference between the two is not really that noticeable when using the system.
<snipped>
So then, can anyone point me to documentation or experience that would lead one to choose x86_64 over i386 on a workstation or desktop? Perceived or otherwise performance gains would be nice, I'm just looking for some "why" type stuff if anyone would like to share their experience and or decision making scenarios with me. This can be done off list or on maybe it would benefit some others?
Sincerely,
Alex White
One reason for going 64-bit is larger address space for applications. If you are not doing high-resolution Finite-Element analysis or C.F.D. or astro-physics, the i386 would probably be OK. Of course, there is then the question of 'Why did you buy an Opteron/Athlon64, only to run a 32-bit OS ?' :-) I am also on the SuSE AMD64 list & they are having their share of problems with their current release (9.3). I have been wanting to build a simple Opteron compute server for about a year now, but have been scared off by the apparent lingering stability issues in SuSE 9.2 & 9.3. That's one of the reasons I am here now, trying to see if things are better w/ CentOS :-).
William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
Alex White wrote:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 19:40 -0500, Ryan Lum wrote:
<snipped>
My question is: is the hardware support for
x86_64 as good as i386. I just installed i386 4.1 without a hang or any problems.
Personally, if I was going to run a server, I would use the x86_64 distro ... but if I was going to run a workstation, I would use the i386 distro. To be perfectly honest, if i386 is stable for you and x86_64 is not, I would recommend you use the i386 distro ... in my experience, the difference between the two is not really that noticeable when using the system.
<snipped>
<snipped>
I'm just looking for some "why" type stuff if anyone would like to share their experience and or decision making scenarios with me. This can be done off list or on maybe it would benefit some others?
Sincerely,
Alex White
One reason for going 64-bit is larger address space for applications. If you are not doing high-resolution Finite-Element analysis or C.F.D. or astro-physics, the i386 would probably be OK. Of course, there is then the question of 'Why did you buy an Opteron/Athlon64, only to run a 32-bit OS ?' :-)
<snipped>
Thanks for the response. I'm certainly not doing any of that. I did however come into the athlon64 by chance and decided to run with it. It's my desktop PC and runs CentOS 4.1 (fully updated of course) and my router/web/ftp/mail server runs i386 CentOS 4.1.
Not noticing anything unstable, other than gftp; however, I was just curious about the implications of having x86_64 arch and what not. Thanks again.
Alex White
Alex White wrote:
Thanks for the response. I'm certainly not doing any of that. I did however come into the athlon64 by chance and decided to run with it. It's my desktop PC and runs CentOS 4.1 (fully updated of course) and my router/web/ftp/mail server runs i386 CentOS 4.1.
Not noticing anything unstable, other than gftp; however, I was just curious about the implications of having x86_64 arch and what not. Thanks again.
I've been considering doing a 4.1 x86_64 install on my spare athlon64 notebook. I'll shoot you an email and let you know how it goes.
Cheers,
Chris Mauritz wrote:
Alex White wrote:
Not noticing anything unstable, other than gftp; however, I was just curious about the implications of having x86_64 arch and what not. Thanks again.
I've been considering doing a 4.1 x86_64 install on my spare athlon64 notebook. I'll shoot you an email and let you know how it goes.
Cheers,
Excellent, I look forward to any information you manage to provide!
Alex White
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Alex White -
Chris Mauritz -
Johnny Hughes -
Ryan Lum -
William A. Mahaffey III