[Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Jeremy Fox]

I have some very basic newbie questions. Is ia64 Linux stable enough
for use for very long running and high memory using (> 5 GB)
scientific computations?

And a followup, if it is stable, is this stability really only found
on kernels above a certain number? If so, what number should I be
upgrading to?

And finally, are certain distributions more committed to ia64 niche
market? And is HP-UX more stable?

Longer story: I bought a Dell workstation of off eBay and the seller
is trying to install Linux on it. He installed SuSE from the isos and
claims it is unstable at high memory. Unfortunately, he doesn't have
any commerical OSes so it is hard to tell if this is a hardware or
software problem. He also can't make install CDs for RedHat because
RedHat doesn't release ia64 isos. :)

-- 
------------------------
Jeremy T. Fox
jerfox@stanford.edu

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Randolph Chung]

> software problem. He also can't make install CDs for RedHat because
> RedHat doesn't release ia64 isos. :)

That is hard to believe, but in any case, you can get Debian isos at:
http://www.debian.org/ports/ia64/

:-)

Dunno about "high memory", but the Debian ia64 build daemon builds on the
order of 100-150 packages of various complexity every day and it's been
running for over 100 days. It's a HP i2000 with 2G of RAM

HTH,
randolph
-- 
   @..@                                         http://www.TauSq.org/
  (----)
 ( >__< )
 ^^ ~~ ^^

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Jeremy Fox]

On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 07:30:16PM -0800, Randolph Chung wrote:

> That is hard to believe, but in any case, you can get Debian isos at:
> http://www.debian.org/ports/ia64/

Thanks for the link. RedHat ia64 seems to be open source as long as
you are willling to open your wallet for $495. Seriously you can
download the individual files but not isos and the seller wasn't able
to make bootable CDs properly. I went to the RedHat ia64 list and I
see some anguish but no success stories.

> Dunno about "high memory", but the Debian ia64 build daemon builds on the 
> order of 100-150 packages of various complexity every day and it's been 
> running for over 100 days. It's a HP i2000 with 2G of RAM

The seller claims it's stable with only 2 GB of RAM, but when he ups
it to 5 GB with SuSE 7.1 the machine crashes every hour or so. If this
is a software problem it's not good because the whole point of using a
64-bit machine is to address more than 2 GB with one process.

-- 
------------------------
Jeremy T. Fox
jerfox@stanford.edu

RE: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Van Maren, Kevin]

The stock IA64 Linux kernel supports 64GB memory and 32 processors.

I've been running on a 4xLion with 32GB ram, with a modified 2.4.9 kernel
(basically fix a couple driver bugs and kick the vm in the teeth so it
doesn't kill my machine).  Others here have been running RedHat 7.2-based
kernels and 2.4.16/18 with the IA64 patches.

If you have problems with > 2GB memory it is most likely due to a driver
problem.  The integrated SCSI and network seem to work fine [network only
uses memory < 2GB]; several others I've had to "fix".

If it just runs "slow", then it is probably a VM issue.

Kevin

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[n0ano]

Jeremy-

Personally, I prefer the TurboLinux distribution.  They were doing
IA64 long before RedHat and their full distribution ISO's are
available through anonymous FTP at

	ftp.turbolinux.com:/pub/ia64/current

On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 11:24:19PM -0800, Jeremy Fox wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 31, 2002 at 07:30:16PM -0800, Randolph Chung wrote:
> 
> > That is hard to believe, but in any case, you can get Debian isos at:
> > http://www.debian.org/ports/ia64/
> 
> Thanks for the link. RedHat ia64 seems to be open source as long as
> you are willling to open your wallet for $495. Seriously you can
> download the individual files but not isos and the seller wasn't able
> to make bootable CDs properly. I went to the RedHat ia64 list and I
> see some anguish but no success stories.

...

> -- 
> ------------------------
> Jeremy T. Fox
> jerfox@stanford.edu
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-IA64 mailing list
> Linux-IA64@linuxia64.org
> http://lists.linuxia64.org/lists/listinfo/linux-ia64

-- 
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
n0ano@indstorage.com
Ph: 303/652-0870x117

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Andreas Schwab]

Jeremy Fox <jerfox@Stanford.EDU> writes:

|> The seller claims it's stable with only 2 GB of RAM, but when he ups
|> it to 5 GB with SuSE 7.1 the machine crashes every hour or so.

If you really mean SuSE 7.1 then it must be a very early test release so
it is no wonder that it is not stable.  We never made a real ia64 release
based on SuSE 7.1.  ISOs of our SuSE 7.2/ia64 release are available from
our ftp server.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE GmbH, Deutschherrnstr. 15-19, D-90429 Nürnberg
Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Jeremy Fox]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 06:17:01PM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:
 
> If you really mean SuSE 7.1 then it must be a very early test release so
> it is no wonder that it is not stable.  We never made a real ia64 release
> based on SuSE 7.1.  ISOs of our SuSE 7.2/ia64 release are available from
> our ftp server.

I think it was 7.2. Thanks for keeping me honest. I shouldn't malign
SuSE, because, as the seller just told me over the phone, it works the
best of any he has tried. It installs and is usable, it just crashes
fairly often. :) Apparently it doesn't crash when memory is reduced to
1 GB, not 2 GB as I earlier said.

Other distributions he recently tried

TurboLinux - wouldn't boot off of the CD
Caldera - installed great and was usable, but on restart had a kernel panic

He's not willing to fork over the $495 to RedHat, and I just convinced
him to try Debian. If that works we are in business. Well I am in
business to spend the rest of my life configuring X-Windows, but
progress is progress.

As someone pointed out, the network and SCSI adapters may be causing
problems. It has an Adaptec Ultra160 dual channel SCSI card for
example, which definitely seems nonstandard.

-- 
------------------------
Jeremy T. Fox
jerfox@stanford.edu

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Andreas Schwab]

Jeremy Fox <jerfox@Stanford.EDU> writes:

|> As someone pointed out, the network and SCSI adapters may be causing
|> problems. It has an Adaptec Ultra160 dual channel SCSI card for
|> example, which definitely seems nonstandard.

Passing "swiotlb@96" to the kernel might make it more stable.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE GmbH, Deutschherrnstr. 15-19, D-90429 Nürnberg
Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Gwenole Beauchesne]

Hi,

>  Thanks for the link. RedHat ia64 seems to be open source as long as
>  you are willling to open your wallet for $495. Seriously you can
>  download the individual files but not isos and the seller wasn't able
>  to make bootable CDs properly.

You mean that you could not boot off the CD from the EFI shell? Anyhow, if 
you have an ls120, you still have the option to make a boot disk and make a 
net install from one their FTP mirrors.

Besides, there are also ISOs available for Mandrake Linux 8.1, OpenLinux 3.0 
(Caldera?) and SuSE Linux 7.2.

Bye,
Gwenole

RE: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Van Maren, Kevin]

> As someone pointed out, the network and SCSI adapters may be causing
> problems. It has an Adaptec Ultra160 dual channel SCSI card for
> example, which definitely seems nonstandard.

Yes, that card works well -- if you have the right driver.

Use the latest Adaptec driver from Justin Gibbs.  There was a bug in the
early 39-bit DMA support that caused the kernel to crash periodically
[if the address just happened to overlab the swiotlb in the low 32 bits].

He incorporated my fix in Change 420:
http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/linux/

If you want to see if that affects you, look at the call to
pci_unmap_single();
if the second parameter is:
   ahc_le32toh(scb->sg_list[0].addr),
you have the broken version.  Note that the 2.4.9 kernel has the broken
version,
and IA64 kernels before that didn't support 39-bit DMA (which leads to
problems
under load, unless you greatly increase swiotlb size).  Not sure what
version
is in the newer IA64 kernels.

Kevin

Re: [Linux-ia64] Basic Advice Needed

[Jeremy Fox]

On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 09:14:10AM -0600, Van Maren, Kevin wrote:

> Use the latest Adaptec driver from Justin Gibbs.  There was a bug in the
> early 39-bit DMA support that caused the kernel to crash periodically
> [if the address just happened to overlab the swiotlb in the low 32 bits].
> 
> He incorporated my fix in Change 420:

I appreciate your work on tracking down these hardware problems, and
everyone else who responded.

Well, the end (for now) of this story is that the seller was mistaken
about the DIMM configuration of the machine, and so it was not worth
the money I was paying for it because I could not upgrade the RAM
without yanking existing DIMMs. So I canceled my order, although the
last thing I was hearing was that the Debian disc was working, perhaps
because it uses a newer version of the kernel (2.4.17 according to the
docs), incorporating bug fixes to drivers (like the one Kevin
submitted) and the like.

I still have an unmet computational need, and I may have to get
another Itanium; and if I do so I'll put Debian on it, unless of
course other distributions upgrade their versions with newer
kernels. :)

If anyone is working on the Debian distro, one minor problem you might
fix is that the iso image does not uncompress properly on a Windows
machine.

-- 
------------------------
Jeremy T. Fox
jerfox@stanford.edu