Hi all,
I've finally decided to retire my venerable P3-500 in favour of a fancy brand
new P4 Hyperthreading CPU, along with a new case, motherboard, memory, video
card, all the bells and whistles.
Now, I'm not new to Gentoo... But since I've only ever needed to install it
once (because it *just* *worked*), 18 months ago, I have to approach the
installation process as a newbie once again.
What I *am* new to is all the newfangled stuff that comes on motherboards
these days :-) Things like ACPI, APIC, and hyperthreading are all new and
scary areas to me. Especially after all the APIC problems I had while
installing Mandrake 9.1 on my friends computer a few months ago.
My old computer has run rock-steady using the 2.6test series of kernels ever
since they came out. I want to use this straight away on my new computer
since I figure it'll have the best chance handling the new hardware.
So here are some questions. This is what I can come up with so far as kind of
a checklist of things I need to know before the computer arrives. If anyone
can help me out or point me in the direction of useful resources on these
issues I would very much appreciate it!
1. During the installation process when it comes time to set up the kernel
can I simply tell it to install development-sources? Will Gentoo balk at me?
Is genkernel safe with 2.6.0? Is genkernel safe at all? I've never used it.
2. I've used XFS with no problems for over 18 months, but because of the
horror stories I've been hearing about it I think I might switch back to good
ol' ReiserFS. But ReiserFS4 is in the works or something like that...
Question: If I use reiserfs from the development kernel, will I have
anything weird happen to be because of different versions of userspace
reiserfs tools? Is there any caveats I need to know about ReiserFS in 2.4
Vs. ReiserFS in 2.6?
3. What's the deal with Hyperthreading? Am I going to need to set up an SMP
kernel? Is there anything else that is important to know about configuring a
Hyperthreading CPU?
4. What's the deal with the sse2 on the P4? I vaguely remember on the
mailing lists there was something bad going on with either sse2 or
-march=pentium4 and some version of gcc... Question: Will it be safe for me
to specify -march=pentium4 in my CFLAGS?
5. What's the deal with ACPI/APIC? These caused me no end of hassles setting
up my friends Mandrake Box. She was using (SiS???) chipset and we had to add
'noapic' just to get it to boot. And the machine is kinda flaky. I'm buying
a Soltek Motherboard with onboard LAN and an intel chipset. I figured I'd
probably have better luck with the intel chipset than SiS. Can anyone tell
me if there's anything important I need to do to try and keep all this new
technology happy and smiling? I figure 2.6.0 would have the best APIC/ACPI
support, which is another reason I'm keen on using it on the new box as well
as the old.
(jeez, ACPI... APIC... do you suppose the next new technologies are going to
be PICA and CAIP? They need new letters to stuff into their acronyms!)
Thanks for any help you can give me :-) I can't wait to finally have a
'modern' computer again.
Tom
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
