AMD64 support in 5.x versions

[david]

Jem Matzan wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 20:08, david wrote:
> 
> 
> 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...
> 

I will. However, as this will mainly be a server, my particular concerns 
are with the linux compatibility. This is an absolute must for this 
machine and from my understanding, this is completely broke in freebsd 
with and amd64 running in 64bit. So, if this doesn't work(i will test) 
then I will go with SUSE which I have talked to several people who run 
it in 64bit and say it works fine. Regardless, I will know something in 
a week or so.

David