Would this system work correctly with FreeBSD 5.3 ?

[Hugo Silva]

Hey all,

Thanks for the replies!

By HTT I meant HyperTransport, isn't that AMD's version of 
HyperThreading? I could be wrong.

Steve Kargl wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>

By crash I meant the OS dying, not hardware/natural causes fault. I've 
had some problems with 5.1 (not on amd64 tho), guess I still distrust 
5.X a bit.. 4.X has always been rock-solid to me, but nowdays I have few 
4.X servers and only one 5.3 server has problems, which I suspect are 
hardware related-- but that's another story.

>  
>
>>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?  
>
>  
>

Yes, I'll use it as a server for gaming only. I wasn't sure if it would 
be better to buy two dual opterons, or a quad opteron. For now I'm going 
with the quad, but it isn't too late to change this yet. I think FreeBSD 
can handle the load with a lot of gameservers ontop of it, it's the 
bandwidth (packet-loss free) that concerns me. One super server with 
lots of gameservers on it will have some packetloss if the network isn't 
good, and packet loss isn't an option when talking about onling gaming 
(First person shooters)