hows Linux with AMD

I've never personally run linux on AMD 64-bit before, but from what I've read there are some problems with drivers and some other programs if you run it in 64-bit mode. Or basically, things tend to be a bit messier compared to your normal 32-bit processor apps/drivers.

Magic of Turion is it can run both 32 and 64 bit distros.

from my experience:
64 bit can get messy especially with lack of hardware support and a lack of certain key packages (w32codecs for one), however there are many writeups and howtos to get around the problem

32 bit runs like butter on hot toast.....very smooth and fast

Heh the problem with 64 Bit linus is not with AMD, in fact that is one of the better running parts of it. AMD supported Linux bringing out the 64 bit version of the kernel, and Linux was the first thing to support 64 bit as a result.

As others have mentioned 64 Bit can appear to be messy at first. HOWEVER there are things you can do to integrate the 32Bit when needed, I think Gentoo is best for this as it allows you to custom compile things 64 Bit or 32 Bit as needed.

In order to do this you would need to set up a 32Bit chroot on your distro. It is a mini environment that you would run 32Bit programs in. I have yet to have any problems with drivers right off hand, but I believe the ATI drivers are still only 32 Bit, though there are many ways to get around this on the Net I think.

Once you get your 32 Bit chroot set up, then I would look into a program called dchroot which will run programs in this 32Bit environment from the Command Line of the 64 Bit. If you write up some scripts to run these programs and put them in your path, once you get things set up it can run seemingly as smooth as a 32 Bit install.

So If you go 64 Bit, look into 32 Bit chroots for your software, make sure you install the 32 Bit emulation software in the 64 bit mode(Which I believe will fix problems with the w32codes brought up here, but cant remember to be sure, as I said set it up right and its hard to tell)

So yes 64 Bit is more work, can be better in some instances, but definitly more work to set up properly. I use it myself on my opteron machine and love it though.

Seablade

This would probably not apply to most people, but NVIDIA's opteron chipset is COMPLETE SH*T!!!

Myself and a few other people I know bought various Tyan boards with the nforce chipset and it's completely unstable under linux. We've had issues with kernel panics and drivers failing to compile properly. In addition, we've had issues with the broadcom drivers on these boards.

My suggestion for anyone getting hardware for linux servers is to make sure all the drivers(ethernet, raid, etc) are in the kernel.

None of this is amd's fault, but it is apart of their platform and reflects poorly on their product. I've had no issues with regular desktop hardware, but when you get into the high end you have to really be careful or else you may get burned.

Bigtrouble what you are referring to is probably the NForce4 Chipset.(I havent heard of any other problems with any of their other chipsets). The NForce4 is known for having problems with audio interfaces especially because the Video Card sucks up the bandwidth of the PCI-E bus. I have heard it suggested that possibly getting a PCI-E Firewire card might help with this if the Firewire Card is used to connect to an audio device, however this doesnt help so much in linux obviously as Linux firewire audio devices are as of this moment not the most stable things around, or well supported. I would think that possibly the same would hold true for USB, but I dont know.

Strangely though the Tyan K8WE is known for not having this problem(Part of the reason I got it). Tyan makes some really good hardware.

I have had absolutely no problem with this. What problems exactly are you having and what board/chipset/drivers are they with?

Seablade

This is the board I have:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8se.html

I cannot get an smp 64 bit kernel to work on this machine from any distribution except debian sarge. Every 'modern' kernel panics. Problem running debian is that 3 devices don't have drivers (2 nic cards and something else).

I've tried compiling several different kernels with different settings, nothing works. I've tried 5 different distros. In addition, I have a broadcom sata raid controller that won't compile properly. Apparently everyone that has this board is having issues in linux and are advised to use the amd chipset instead. I've also found that something in the chipset may be causing some of the compiles to fail.

Someone suggested somewhere that the board's bios activates certain things when windows is installed, which would explain why some devices fail in linux. I personally think that's a bit far fetched.

I guess I kinda wanted to use this thread to vent because this has been driving me crazy over the past few months. So many people are having issues with the nforce4 chipset in linux. What distro are you running and are you running 64bit smp???? I'd love to know how well your K8WE works.

I am not running the SMP kernel yet, that will be probably in a couple of months though. I do know people that are though without problems(From a different board)

However I believe that is a board that is very similar o mine, and I would be willing to bet the Ethernet ports you mentioned not having a driver, do in fact havev a driver, which is the Forcedeth driver if I remember right. Ill check again in a bit but I am pretty sure that is what I am running on mine.

I have NEVER heard of a board that activated certain aspects depending on the OS, short of possibly a built in WinModem which I never dealt with anyways.

I am running Gentoo by the way, and am having some unrelated problems with my audio card that I am trying to figure out, havent been able to yet. I dont believe they are the NForce bug showing up because as I said the K8WE is one of the boards i have seen singled out for not having that bug. Still working on figuring out exactly what is causing it, I am leaning towards it may be my audio card itself, it is based off the ICE1712 chipset, but is a little odd in that it is just a PCI interface card to a Roland VM-3100 Pro.

It is supposed to go up to 96K and I am 99 percent sure i have run it at that with no problem in the past, but for some reason now I am having problems. Also I am noticing more problems now than when I first started my gentoo box, so I am certain it is something on my end, either an incompatibility between the card itself and my drivers, or something I have installed that i still have to track down.

Seablade

Running I believe 2.6.13 kernel.

Interesting.

I have my HP L2000 (AMD Turion) running on Fedora Core 4, all 64-bit (not needed a 32-bit chroot yet), and is running quite happy overall (though wireless is still not working).

I am investigating an issue with cross-compile for OpenEmbedded, by placing FC4 on my Sager (just to rule out 64-bit in every way). If that's clean, I'll re-do the HP's Linux for a proper 64-32 setup.

--TSK

Some things require the 32 bit environment. Wine for instance I dont think runs on 64 bit natively yet. Also I believe ATI's drivers are 32 bit. However there are emulation libraries to allow the 32 bit programs to run in 64 bit. I have run across a few that did not work though even doing this, thus the need for the 32 bit environment for them to be compiled in and run in. Actually though since then developers are starting to write their code more for compatibility with AMD64 and havent had to use it much lately thanks to patches.

Seablade

My desktop runs 64-bit on gentoo and I must say pretty much everything works on 64-bit like it would on 32-bit, the exception of browser plugins (if you want to use a 64-bit browser) and windows codecs ( you have to use a 32-bit build of mplayer)

I would say 64-bit linux works much better than 64-bit windows.

I'm running SUSE 9.3 64bit on my dual Opteron w2100z with no problems. I'm running SLES9 on a 4 dual core (8-way) DL585 with 8G ram... we're still testing that one.. but looks pretty good so far.

I can confirm that this is true with respect to ACPI. They do this with the DSDT which is code in the BIOS to tell ACPI how the hardware is configured. If you disassemble your DSDT, you will find pieces of assembly code that check for the length of the OS identifier to determine whether you're running a certain version of Windows. For example, XP identifies itself as "Microsoft Windows XP" and is detected by the DSDT code by checking whether the identifier is 20 characters long. In some instances, the DSDT code will alter its behaviour based on the OS you run. It is possible to override the OS identifier string in the Linux kernel's ACPI mechanism by using the 'acpi_os_name' boot switch.

Hmm interesting to know, thanks Markin.

Seablade

My pleasure. FYI, here's the log for my DSDT fiddling: http://gentoo.mikhailmarkin.com/archives/5

I just got through installing Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) AMD_64 on my Compaq presario v2410US (AMD Turion ML-30 1.6ghz). It was a painful process, and I now think that it is better to just use 32 bit Linux rather than mess with 64bit if you want to use software outside the repository for your distribution. Although I have installed a chroot environment, I haven't been able to get seamonkey or the latest openoffice to run in the chroot properly. I need Flash and Realplayer because gplflash and mediaplayer with ra codecs just don't cut it.

Anyway, here are my notes for installing Ubuntu in case anyone is thinking of installing a linux on a similar machine:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~abatto/essays/...paq-v2410.html

HMm couple of questions for you...

Uh why run OpenOffice in the chroot? It should run decently under 32 bit emulation with the correct emul-libs installed. I even have the bin on Gentoo because it doesnt like 64bit apparently is what I have been told, but it runs fine as long as you have the emul-libs installed.

Flash, again emul libs and use the 32bit version of firefox.

Seamonkey I am not familiar with so I aint touchin

A 32 bit chroot definitly aint the easiest way to go, however it also allows a good amount of flexibility with things so I do like it for that reason.

Seablade

Ubuntu Breezy only has OpenOffice Beta, and I wanted to run open OpenOffice 2.0.1, but I couldn't get the binaries to install, so I tried it in a chroot environment. It installed without errors, but I couldn't get it to run--actually I was never able to find the command to run it, so maybe it works. My locate command doesn't work in the chroot environment.

In the case of seamonkey, I tried to compile it and ran into trouble in the normal 64 bit mode, so I decided to install the binaries in the 32bit chroot environment. It installed without error, but it won't run. I'm not sure why.

amosbatto, you should have no problems installing OOo2.0.1 in ubuntu, i've installed it in Breezy easily (which came stock with 1.1.4).

Here is what you do:
1 - apt-get remove open-office
2 - download RPM binaries from openoffice.org
3 - alien -i package.rpm package2.rpm package3.rpm ...etc (all the rpms that come in the package)

this should pretty much take care of it.