Linux SMP Round-Up

Dual Minds writes "LinuxHardware.org is at it again and this time they cover three of the finest boards on the market. This review covers three dual processor Xeon boards and they are the only site that ever does Linux reviews (at least on a regular basis). Here's a peak: "First thing is that all E7505-based boards are basically the same on the surface due to the basic features of the chipset. They all have dual processor support, support for dual channel DDR, and support for PCI-X up to 133MHz (to name a few). Once a manufacturer gets their hands on the board though, features can be added or it can simply be left as is." Very in depth and some sweet hardware."

Comments

Re:FreeBSD 5.0?

[Billly Gates]

I would too.

FreeBSD 5.0's smp has totally been redone over previous versions. Also the threading has been rewritten to make it more competitive with Linux.

However once Linux 2.6 comes out they will be far behind again.

Re:Does linux support hypertrheading?

[puetzk]

yes, linux 'supports' hyperthreading - that took no changes at all, since they just show who up as more CPU targets. 2.5 kernels, and (I think) some of the 2.4 scheduler patchsets, also have some special tuning to avoid some of the worse behaviors hyperthreading can cause (when processes hop back and forth between physical images cores, or end up overcrowded on one virtual image).

So linux support for HT is pretty good :-)

Your answer is not in the CPU

[MarcQuadra]

'Most responsive user experience'? Switch to SCSI. The major bottleneck in any PC is the crappy disk access. I get better app start times on my 400Mhz U2W SCSI system (80MB/sec max) than my Athlon 1400 with ATA-133. The SCSI theoretical speed limit might be lower (in the example above), but real-world performance favors SCSI.

Go get an Adaptec 29160 and a 36GB 10K Cheetah drive for your / and /usr partitions. Put /home on your IDE drive. Get the best of both worlds. When you recover from the investment you can move the whole SCSI deal to the next machine (and it'll STILL kick the next generation PCs ass!).

Re:How is it a Linux Review without the Distro?

[beerits]

Quake3's smp only works with Nvidia TNT2 cards under NT4.

This is just not true. Quake 3 smp also works under Mac OS X and it does has a large impact on FPS.

Yes, It Does

[peatbakke]

Linux does support hyperthreading. 2.4.20 recognizes four processors on my dual Xeon servers, without any tweaks. I think it's pretty nice -- I'd say there's between a 5% and 25% pickup in performance, depending on what you're using it for (generic vs. optimized integer code).

According to a geek.com article, Linux was actually the first operating system to officially support hyperthreading, and that was in late 2001.

Re:Yes, It Does

[peatbakke]

Hyperthreading is not fully transparent to the OS. The scheduler needs to be aware of the processors capabilities to take advantage of it. It's not a very difficult situation to adapt to, but it's not transparent.

And yes, it was official, because it was rubber stamped by Intel.

Not all E7505 boards are of the same design

[questionlp]

Blockquoth the article:

First thing is that all E7505-based boards are basically the same on the surface due to the basic features of the chipset. They all have dual processor support, support for dual channel DDR, and support for PCI-X up to 133MHz (to name a few). Once a manufacturer gets their hands on the board though, features can be added or it can simply be left as is.

There are some boards out there that don't match the template found in the three boards reviewed. Tyan has a board, the Tiger i7505 to be exact, does not include PCI-X slots but rather has the normal complement of 5 PCI slots.

The PCI-X controller used in almost all of the E750x workstation/server boards is really expensive and adds to the complexity of the board layout and design. It seems that Tyan decided to forgo that chip in order to keep the cost of the board down while making up for it by adding Serial ATA (but no FireWire like it's larger Thunder i7505 brother).

One board that I would like to have seen reviewed is the Supermicro X5DAL (with or without Serial ATA RAID) as it does include PCI-X slots, but it is also a standard ATX-sized motherboard. It only has four memory slots, so that may have changed some of the memory timings and possibly have improved some of the scores by a small amount.

One a side note, FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE users will also benefit from the newly added support for HyperThreading found in all P4-based Xeons and the 3.06GHz P4. More info can be had here. I'm not sure if that feature is also available in 5.0-CURRENT (I would think it would be MFC).

Check your chipset drivers [offtopic]

[MarcQuadra]

I'm running Gentoo Linux 1.4rc1. Everything is built from scratch with optimizations so it's as fast as can be on both machines. I'm running kernel 2.4.20 on both machines.

I should note that the SCSI performance boost is still huge in Windows, but less profound than in Linux due to the way Windows aligns frequently used files on the disk.

As for your performance issues, try updating the drivers for your chipset (Intel INF and Intel Application Accelerator / VIA Hyperion 4-in-1) to make sure you're getting the most from your motherboard.

Intel Chipset Driver Matrix

VIA Hyperion Downloads