Answers inline, below:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Behalf Of Jim
> Sibley
> Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 2:40 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: SuSE vs Red Hat
>
>
> IMHO, SuSE seems to be more zSeries friendly.
>
> Some differences:
>
> - SuSE SLES8 allows the hertz timer to be turned on or
> off, depending on whether your are under VM or not.
> RedHat RHEL3 does not - hence you may have a
> performance issue with RedHat under VM with "idle"
> machines.
Not true (any more). From RELEASE-NOTES-U2-en:
o Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 2 includes a modification to the way
the Linux kernel timer interrupt is handled. Normally, a hardware
timer is set to generate periodic interrupts at a fixed rate (100
times a second for most architectures). These periodic timer
interrupts are used by the kernel to schedule various internal
housekeeping tasks, such as process scheduling, accounting, and
maintaining system uptime.
While a timer-based approach works well for a system environment where
only one copy of the kernel is running, it can cause additional
overhead when many copies of the kernel are running on a single
system, as z/VM(R) guests, for example. In these cases, having 1,000
copies of the kernel each generating interrupts many times a second
can result in excessive system overhead.
Therefore, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 2 now includes the
ability to turn off periodic timer interrupts. This is done through
the /proc/ file system; to disable periodic timer interrupts, issue
the following command:
echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/hz_timer
To enable periodic timer interrupts, issue the following command:
echo "1" > /proc/sys/kernel/hz_timer
By default, periodic timer interrupts are enabled.
This can also be set at boot-time; to do so, add the following line to
/etc/sysctl.conf to disable periodic timer interrupts:
kernel.hz_timer = 0
Note
Disabling periodic timer interrupts can violate basic assumptions in
system accounting tools. Should you notice a malfunction related to
system accounting, verify that the malfunction disappears if periodic
timer interrupts are enabled, then submit a bug at
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ (for malfunctioning bundled tools), or
inform the tool vendor (for malfunctioning third-party tools).
> - Redhat does not really support Reiserfs, if that is
> your preference. It allows mounting Reiser, but it
> does not include the tools necessary to support the
> filesystem (mkfs, tune, and the like).
No argument there, but thus far ext3 has worked great for us.
--
Thomas Cameron, RHCE, CNE, MCSE, MCT
Assistant Vice President
Linux Design and Engineering
Bank of America
(972) 997-9641
The opinions expressed in this message are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
the opinions of my employer, Bank of America.
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