Joel Martin wrote:
> By the way, these are my own personal opinions and do not represent in
> any form the opinions of my employer.
>
Geez, Joel - you're a big guy, I don't think anyone is going to come after you for
it. :) Anyway, Bayard finally beat me into carving out the 5 seconds it took to
subscribe to the list, so here I am (finally). Yes, everything Joel mentioned
about the system is accurate (I won't mention the Emulex bits...).
The system is one of the main Tru64 engineering GS systems; it's a proto that has
(mostly) been brought up to production rev. Being a proto, it had a few bugs and
among them was a bad CPU slot. So, they decided that engineering could do with 31
CPUs until replacing it wouldn't cost a customer lead time on a system.
I was lucky enough to have someone lend me a few minutes of time on the system to
try everything out. But now that it has been shown to work, it's a fully
sanctioned project (I've even got fairly routine access to an 8P partition). Soon
enough, we should have the DISCONTIGMEM stuff working, which means that the memory
wierdness (anyone notice the system reported ~480GB of available memory?) should go
away. From there, it's onward and upward. :)
- Pete
P.S. And as soon as someone ships a release with a bootable 2.4-series kernel,
I'll be making sure that you can perform an install right onto a GS as well... :)
>
> On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 11:52:53AM -0400, Joel Martin wrote:
> > Good eye Bruce,
> >
> > AFAIK, the system that wasn't built to run Linux, it was just that there
> > was some free time and an internal guy took the opportunity to see
> > how a Linux 2.4 kernel would do on the machine. Turns out pretty well
> > :-) I don't believe that he had to patch the kernel at all to achieve
> > this, the current Alpha updates were sufficient.
> >
> > So...those PCI lines about the Emulex Fibre Channel HBA's are just the
> > kernel recognizing that something is there. There isn't currently an
> > Alpha Emulex driver that exists for Linux.
> >
> >
> > A little history and a rant:
> >
> > A couplle months ago Emulex announced that it was going to release
> > it's Fibre Channel drivers Open Source for Linux and that it would
> > compile for Alpha Linux machines as well:
> > http://www.emulex.com/press/2000/linux.html
> >
> > Well, a few days ago I was informed that they had released the driver.
> > So I went to their ftp site:
> > ftp://ftp.emulex.com/pub/fibrechannel/drivers/all_other_lp_models/linux/4.02f/
> >
> > Downloaded the driver and had a look. Hmmm... the driver is NOT
> > Open Source and does NOT compile on Alpha Linux. I've contacted Emulex
> > about this but the director of marketing that I talked to is holding the
> > position that the press release was in error about the Open Source release.
> >
> > I don't believe him, and I've told him as much because the directory
> > that the partial source is contained in is named "OpenSource"
> > capitalization and all. And the documentation mentions that it is Open
> > Source.
> >
> > If you look at what they provide in the download, you will see that
> > the key part of the driver (the actual interface with the Emulex
> > hardware) is closed x86 object files (one for uniprocessor and one for
> > multiprocessor). The source is really just the upper layers of the
> > Fibre Channel stack which isn't very valuable because the protocol is
> > very well documented and Qlogic and Interphase provide full linux
> > source for their FC cards.
> >
> > If you want to contact Emulex more about this, the guy I've been
> > talking to is their director of marketing Mike Kane:
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
> > Joel Martin
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 11:05:23AM -0400, Bruce McCulley wrote:
> > > So it's got a fair amount of grunt on the compute side, how's the I/O
> > > bandwidth?
> > >
> > > I only saw 8 fiberchannels, right? Am I missing anything?
> > >
> > > :-)
> > >
> > > Joel Martin wrote:
> > >
> >
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>
> --
> Joel Martin -- System Software Engineer
> Compaq Computer Corporation
> 110 Spit Brook Rd, ZKO3-3/U14
> Nashua, NH 03062-2698
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 603.884.5061
>
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