[CentOS] core 2 duo motherboards and centos 4

On Sat, 27 Jan 2007 at 8:34pm, Joe Pruett wrote

> On Fri, 19 Jan 2007, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 at 9:22am, Joe Pruett wrote
>>
>>> and i did just stuble across a dell system (precision 390) that claims to
>>> support rhel4 and core 2 duo.  has anyone else used that system succesfully?
>>
>> Yep.  The one I have is running the i686 kernel, but x86_64 on it should work
>> just as well.
>
> did you have to do anything magic to get it installed?  did you happen to
> use pxe to install?  the new ethernet chips seems to be the source of most
> of the problems i'm fighting with core 2 duo boards.

Being in Dell's Precision family, the hardware is (for the most part) 
pretty conservative.  The ethernet chip is a BCM5754, and I kickstarted it 
just fine with no special options (no PXE though) when I installed it.

That being said, I *did* have a good time with the network chips in my new 
Xeon 5160 cluster nodes.  Those are on Supermicro X7DVL-E boards with 
Intel 82563EB network controllers.  The driver in CentOS 4.3 didn't 
recognize the NICs at all, and the one in 4.4 worked enough to install 
'em but would intermittently decide to stop passing traffic (on eth1, at 
least).  Installing the latest driver from intel.com (7.3.20) fixed 'em 
up.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University