Basic Advice Needed
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. :)
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------------------------ Jeremy T. Fox [email protected]
Quoted 2 lines
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
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@..@ http://www.TauSq.org/ (----) ( >__< ) ^^ ~~ ^^
Quoted 2 lines · Randolph Chung
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.
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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.
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------------------------ Jeremy T. Fox [email protected]
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
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
Quoted 10 lines · Jeremy Fox
Quoted 2 lines · Randolph Chung
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.
...
Quoted 9 lines
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------------------------ Jeremy T. Fox [email protected] _______________________________________________ Linux-IA64 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxia64.org/lists/listinfo/linux-ia64
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Don Dugger "Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale [email protected] Ph: 303/652-0870x117
Jeremy Fox <[email protected]> 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.
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Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, [email protected] 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."
Quoted 4 lines · Andreas Schwab
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.
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------------------------ Jeremy T. Fox [email protected]
Jeremy Fox <[email protected]> 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.
Signature · 4 lines
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, [email protected] 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."
Hi,
Quoted 4 lines
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
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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
Quoted 5 lines · Kevin
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.
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------------------------ Jeremy T. Fox [email protected]