Would this system work correctly with FreeBSD 5.3 ?

[Steve Kargl]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 11:29:01PM +0000, Hugo Silva wrote:
> 
> I'm buying a Quad AMD Opteron 64 bits, with 4GB memory. I'd like to know 
> if FreeBSD 5.3 will support a quad-cpu system (with HTT, 8) correctly, 
> without performance losses and consistent operation, no crashes etc. Is 
> the 4GB memory still a problem in amd64 ?

You're asking a possibly bad question.

First, FreeBSD 5.3 will run on a quad opteron system.  The tyan
quad motherboard supports upto 32 GB on memory, and FreeBSD 5.3
should/will use all 32 GB.  So, your 4 GB is no problem.

Second, HTT may or may not cause a small impact on performance.
It depends on what applications you run.  Of course, my opteron
processes don't support HTT

  CPU: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 248 (2193.43-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0xf58  Stepping = 8
  Features=0x78bfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,
  MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2>

Third, what OS have you run that you have never experienced a crash?
If your electricity goes out, you'll have a crash.  If your hard drive
dies a (un)natural death, then you have a crash.


> Lastly, I'd like to hear experiences of linux-compat games (such as 
> enemy territory, call of duty, halflife 2) running on FreeBSD-AMD64 -- 
> Do they work correctly on this 64bit CPU system ?

Linux-compat for 32-bit applications works.  But I must ask, you're
purchasing a quad opteron system to run games?  

-- 
Steve