AMD64 support in 5.x versions

[Jem Matzan]

On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 20:08, david wrote:
> Jem Matzan wrote:
> > I've tried just about everything AMD64 in terms of operating systems,
> > and I can say for certain that no one is anywhere near the level of
> > functionality that their i386 arch is. Even SuSE and RedHat with their
> > retail box AMD64 distros only offer limited AMD64 functionality. Gentoo
> > will install but few things will compile properly. I'd consider FreeBSD
> > and NetBSD further along than Gentoo at this point, except for the fact
> > that Gentoo can update its source code and FreeBSD can't (without the
> > special hacked CVSup).
> > FreeBSD would be a step ahead of everyone else if IA32 binary
> > compatibility worked.
> > 
> > -Jem
> 
> What do you mean by "limited AMD64 functionality"? I am looking into 
> other forms of *nix due to the fact that linux compatibility is a must 
> for the programs I will be running. Any other information you can 
> provide pertaining to AMD64 + linux compatibility would be very useful.
> 
> David
> 
Well, about the only GNU/Linux distros that will work are the ones made
for AMD64. SuSE 9.0 for x86 will work to a reasonable degree. I had a
beta copy of SuSE 9.0 for AMD64 and it didn't work very well at all,
neither did the RC2 of Mandrake 9.2 AMD64. It's since been overwritten
and I've requested a retail edition of SuSE 9.0/AMD64 for review but it
hasn't come.

3D accerleration for ATI video cards in Linux/AMD64 seems out of the
question for right now. On the other hand it was out of the question for
FreeBSD anyway. The most common problem I had with Linux was drivers for
the SysKonnect LAN, and I don't have another card for testing. Some,
like Fedora Core and Lycoris Update 3, would lock up or restart the
machine. I wish I could just get an x86 GNU/Linux distro installed
properly with all of the right drivers just so I can run VMWare 4 and
maybe play UT2003 again now and then.

Gentoo/AMD64 will install, but there are no boot loaders ported to AMD64
yet (for GNU/Linux anyway) and I had trouble compiling nearly everything
I was interested in running. The last time I tried Gentoo/AMD64 was a
week and a half ago and it was unusable.

I tried FreeBSD 5.2-RC2 last night again, but there seems to be some
kind of problem with dhclient and the SysKonnect LAN. It will try to
connect to the DHCP server for about two minutes and then give up,
leaving me with no Internet access. 5.2-CURRENT/x86 will do this now and
then too, but usually when I see it stay too long at the dhclient
message during startup, I hit ctrl-alt-del to restart the system and it
generally loads fine after that. Sometimes I have to restart the system
two or three times to get dhclient to load properly. On the AMD64 port
though, I restarted a dozen times, reset my cable modem and router,
switched cat5 cables... nothing works. So it's back to x86 again.

Let me know if you get anything working in terms of GNU/Linux,
specifically community distros...

-- 
Jem Matzan <techsupport at thejemreport.com>