TSC support is required under Solaris for cpufreq on MP systems due to realtime accounting needs. Systems before Barcelona will not work in MP mode with frkit on PowerNow K8. Replacing with Barcelona will allow you to use cpufreq, reducing your power bill. Power savings will be offset by initial upgrade cost, which involves a new board and the cpu, but you should see $25/mo savings per unit. I cannot afford to upgrade as I do so only every 2 years, so Solaris is quickly becoming a non-option as it is becoming an expense as opposed to a gain. If you have dual core or a dual socket machine, Solaris will not save you money unless you're ready to float $500 or more on new hardware.
FreeBSD, Windows XP/Vista, and Linux do not have the same realtime architecture (Or in cases no realtime at all) so they can save you money on your older hardware. I would be running FreeBSD if VirtualBox were available, though I'm evaluating other systems as well. OpenSolaris is becoming worthless for my needs because they will not even attempt to backport, insisting that TSC dependence is a requirement, when I personally would care less about time drift if I could actually save money. Disabling the second core is also an option, which in large could be a stop-gap until an upgrade is possible. If you have an Intel Core 2 or above speedstep on MP should work fine, and I find this a potentially good option as AMD lately has not been very competitive. I still have another year before upgrading will be an option. When I bought this system from Sun, I expected to eventually have these features, but the engineers have a different mindset than the customer. All in all it's costing me money. If you like OpenSolaris, and you can upgrade, you'll save money, otherwise you're already losing money. James On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 11:31 AM, Christian Walther <cptsalek at gmail.com> wrote: > Hello List, > Hello Milan, > > I just subscribed to this list after I installed OpenSolaris on my > Athlon X2 powered server at home. The issue here is powernowd. > > In a message I found in the "PowerNow AMD Athlon64 X2 (dual core)" > Milan Jurick stated: > > "If you motherboard supports Barcelona based AMD, then > change to that CPU." > URL: > http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/laptop-discuss/2008-June/010647.html > > I just migrated from FreeBSD to OpenSolaris because of the features > Solaris offers. But since the server is located at home, saving power > is an issue. > What I don't understand is what one would gain by replacing the CPU > with a Barcelona based one? > > I'm just asking because changing the CPU might really be an option > here, as long as there really is some power saving so that the > additional costs are covered eventually. > > Regards > Christian Walther > _______________________________________________ > laptop-discuss mailing list > laptop-discuss at opensolaris.org > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/laptop-discuss/attachments/20080630/2afae90d/attachment.html>
