Mandrake To Support AMD's Hammer

ruiner writes "Mandrake has announced their intention to support AMD's Hammer with a 64 bit version optimized for the new CPU. Redhat is also rumored to be following Suse's lead. 'This new generation of AMD Athlon and AMD Opteron processors is extremely exciting. A version of Mandrake Linux dedicated to these powerful 64-bit processors can certainly accelerate MandrakeSoft's growing adoption in the Linux corporate market' said Jacques Le Marois, CEO of MandrakeSoft."

Comments

Suse?

[Spyky]

For those who don't know, because its very unclear from the article, Suse was the first (or at least before Mandrake) linux distro to announce Hammer support.

Check it out here

-Spyky

Re:why is this such a big deal?

[guacamole]

They haven't done anything to improve that OS in over a decade.

You are truly an idiot if you think so. As for Linux, no matter how much it has improved, it still has a long way to go to match Solaris what solaris has had for years. now.

MTRR

[Paul Jakma]

MTRR == Memory Type Range Register

Used to set different policy (uncacheable, write-back, write-combing) to address ranges. Eg, for address ranges that correspond to PCI addresses (ie memory mapped IO addresses), by setting these ranges to write-combining the CPU will try to gather writes up into big writes to make most efficient use of IO bus bandwidth. (ie get higher MB/s out of your AGP or PCI - important for graphics).

see linux/Documentation/mtrr.txt and /proc/mtrr.

Re:MandrakeSoft cooperates with AMD to support x86

[Paul Jakma]

AMD Hammer/Opteron is completely IA32 (ie normal 32bit x86) compatible - all IA32 OSes boot on it, it has a standard IA32 BIOS, applications will run fine on it. If you run a x86-64 OS, then you will be able to run both 32bit and 64bit x86-64 software (side by side).

Ie x86-64 is:

- IA32 (8086 mode et al too - i /guess/)
- standard IA32 BIOS
- additional x86-64 mode

Apparently 32-bit Linux and Windows booted almost first time on early silicon, and they've had absolutely no 32bit compatibility problems - it all works. then it took just a week for AMD to get linux to boot into x86-64 mode (iirc from the talk linked below).

IA64 / Itanium on the other hand is a completely new architecture:

- completely different instruction set
- completely different ABI
- new weird "look it does everything" BIOS (EFI)
- IA32 is /emulated/ in silicon and hence slow

There's a good talk by an AMD engineer on the AMD Hammer arch. given at the recent kernel summit at:

http://ksmp3rep.sf.net/KSMP3s/amd64.mp3

found amongst other kernel summit talks at:

http://linuxkernel.foundries.sourceforge.net/artic le.pl?sid=02/06/26/0116225

Take a look at gentoo for your 486

[Billly Gates]

Try Gentoo. Whats great about this distro is that you can recompile the whole sytem with "emerge world". That also includes all the apps and not just the kernel. I have never used it( yet) but later next month I will have broadband so I can try it out. It uses something called portage which a mix between debian apt-get and FreeBSD's ports, where you can have automatic dependency downloads or you can download the newest libs and recompile not only the kernel but the whole system with the new libs! Great for experimenting with gcc 3.1. Whats ideal about this is that you can recompile the whole system for your 486. Go here for info. Just add the settings to CHOST in /etc/make.conf to "platform=i486" and go to the CFLAGS section in the same file and add the following "o3" to make sure its optimized. After this type "emerge world" and reboot and thats it. Your whole system including all your apps will be 486 optimized. The 2 catches with gentoo is that its not a newbie distro. Make sure you fully read all of the documentation and print it all out before you even start the install. Second it will be painfully slow on your 486 to do a "emerge world". You need at least 64 megs of ram or a big ass swap space to do the install. Expect a literal all nighter for this. If your box is at work do it in the evening and pray it will be done by morning. The pro's are you only have to do the "emerge world" once. The second thing is that it will be fully optimized for your 486 and you will learn a hell of alot of info about unix and linux in general. The third is you will not have the 20 are so bloated daemons installed by defualt like mandrake and redhat. It will be slim which is important on your old computer. I have heard that this makes gentoo faster then any other distro. Even on modern athlon systems. Since Gentoo in my opinion has the best documentation so this shouldn't be too much of a problem.