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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."
from the hammer-time-joke-goes-here dept.
Followed by a press release from AMD and mandrake saying "can't touch this!"
I'm not knocking Hammer, but why does everyone act like the Itanium and Hammer versions of Linux are the first 64 bit versions? I was running 64 bit Linux several years ago on my Multia!
Once you have GCC that will compile for the target arch, and you have the needed changes to Linux to support that arch, why is it more than bunch of builds to get a 64 bit version? Many (perhaps even most) apps are now 64 bit clean (unlike certain other criminal OS's).
Why does everyone ignore the MIPS and Alpha versions?
(and OT: When will a MIPS version of Linux with full support for the extra hardware in an Indy come out?)
www.eFax.com are spammers
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
Well, what do you expect? Ninety percent of press-releases are overhyped; they only exist to make something look big and significant. You might want something like this:
"In a totally pedestrian move, Mandrake - as utterly expected - announced a totally unsurprising future port to the Hammer architecture. As everybody have realized for the past year, Linux will be running on the platform, and this of course includes all the major distributions. Spokesmen for the company added: 'of course, no end-users will see any actual results from this announcement for another year or so, when actual systems will be available'. Added the AMD spokesperson: 'As far as novelty value goes, this announcement is the equivalent of watching paint dry.' Both did add that they do get a little free press out of the announcement, making it more valuable than the paper it's printed on."
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Talk about how people say MIPS and Alpha is dead (just a little trolling) - who honestly uses or knows of someone using a 386 anymore.
Why don't all distro companiesstart atleast compiling for 486 and also have at the least a distro that is compiled entirely for, say 586 (like Mandrake).
I don't understand why companies like RedHat (who make a great solid modern distro) don't make available for the more modern processors a distro optimized for it.
Why sacrafice new technology (speed) for the old and thus making the new run at the speeds of the old?
They're not crowing about the fact that they can compile for these systems, they're crowing about the fact that they are going to compile for these systems, and support them. Since compiling code into working binaries and supporting those binaries is what Mandrake does, I think they're justified in crowing about this. As a big AMD fan, I applaud Mandrake for this, even though I use and support Debian myself.
Slackware and Redhat and SuSE may or may not support this platform directly, I don't know. It's certainly not guaranteed. There are plenty of platforms they don't support, even though they could. It's probably going to depend on whether they think they can make enough money off of it.
And yes, Debian will almost certainly support the Hammer as soon as we get our hands on some. But then we're insane, and support everything we can. Who else still supports m68k and ARM? Who else is _adding_ support for HPPA and Super8? We do it because it's fun, not because we're trying to make money.
(As for the thing about security advisories, that's a bit off-topic, but I will say that Debian's security list is intended for Debian's users, so that they know when officially supported packages are available, and it's not our fault that bugtraq decided to subscribe to our list. Complain to bugtraq if it bothers you that much.)
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).
/guess/)
/emulated/ in silicon and hence slow
c le.pl?sid=02/06/26/0116225
Ie x86-64 is:
- IA32 (8086 mode et al too - i
- 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
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/arti
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