On 1 Apr 2004, at 12:11, Andreas U. Trottmann wrote:
So, does anyone have any hints? First for the kernel; is it just the
case that the debian kernel won't work on the altix? Does it have a
different memory map than others, which generates the relocation problem?
Oh yes, and then some. The architecture of the Altix is really very different from other Itanium2 machines. It uses SGI's own chips for the interconnects, and even if it booted, a generic kernel wouldn't know about the NUMA topology of the machine, so the performance would most likely be very poor.
The scheduler in SGI's kernel that they supply you with is supposed to have a completely rewritten scheduler to understand the NUMA architecture.
And second for the "trying to overwrite": Is it possible to somewhere put a "force-overwrite" in order to get the current sarge state installed at all?
I really don't think there's much point in doing what you're trying to do - lovely though Debian is, the performance is going to be very poor without SGI's kernel modifications, and that's assuming you get it to work at all.
Tim
-- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
