----- Original Message ----- From: "Benjamin Scott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Greater NH Linux Users' Group" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 5:14 PM Subject: Re: Update on my Dual PIII/RAID install
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2001, Rich C wrote: > > 2.) Promise supports Red Hat with PDC20265 drivers in both UP and SMP > > flavors. > > Keep in mind that if Promise ever goes out of business, stops supporting > Red Hat, or just plain drops the ball, you will be unable to upgrade your > system any more, because of the lack of drivers. Furthermore, the Linux > kernel people generally will not help you, since you are running a system > with binary-only drivers. I wouldn't expect the kernel folks to help with that. I would merely disable the Promise controller and do software RAID like you said before. I just wanted to beat this horse until it worked. > > Personally, I avoid anything that does not provide source. It is for that > reason that my next video card is probably going to be an ATI Raedon, rather > than an NVidia GeForce. > > > ... the system wouldn't boot afterwards. I don't know if it was because > > of the "funny" RAID superblocks ... > > A hardware RAID controller should not expose any of its internal > housekeeping data to the OS (or other software). As far as the OS is > concerned, you just have a single, normal drive. All the mirroring happens > at a layer lower than that. But didn't you say earlier that it's not true hardware RAID? [snip] > For a real test, I would start some intensive task (e.g., kernel compile), > and disconnect power from one of the drives. See if it lives through that. > If it does, repeatedly, it might be worth trusting. > That's a good idea. I will try that at some point. > > After rebuilding the array, it was time to get the SMP working. Red Hat > > install didn't make an initrd image for the SMP kernel, since there was > > only one processor in the machine at install time. > > I have does Red Hat installs on quite a few SMP boxes with only one > processor installed, and in every case, it installed and booted the SMP > kernel (with initrd) by default. > > If I had to guess, I would say the fact that you had to feed it drivers > from diskette was the cause. Maybe. You don't really even NEED initrd unless you need some special drivers loaded, or am I wrong? [snip] > > To sum up, how do I like having a 2GHz machine ... > > I am picking nits now, but that should be written as "2 x 1 GHz". One 2 > GHz processor is not the same as two 1 GHz processors. Multithreaded > applications -- and overall system performance -- will get a bigger boost > from SMP. Single-threaded applications will get a bigger boost from a > higher clock. That's primarily why I built this machine, instead of shelling out the bucks for a 1.7GHz P4. And since I don't do Windows 2000, NT, or even XP, Linux was the perfect platform to exploit the two processors. :o) > > Probably not so important to you, but it can be a very significant > difference if you are tuning for a particular application. :-) It is important to me. Once I get this system ironed out and I'm comfortable with it, I plan to build a real time kernel using RTLinux and play with that in an SMP environment. Rich Cloutier President, C*O SYSTEM SUPPORT SERVICES www.sysupport.com ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
