Marcin Romaszewicz (marcin++at++asmodean.engr.sgi.com)
Mon, 25 Oct 1999 15:50:38 -0700 (PDT)
>
> I assume that the machine should have the faster processor
> and as much memory as I can afford. How about drives; is
> the faster access time of a SCSI drive important? ( For that
> matter, does Linux have problems with drives with more than
> 4Gig of space? That apparently was a problem when trying to
> install NT4 and RedHat 5 on a single drive. )
>
Processor and memory matter the most. The benefits of a fast cpu are
obvious, and you should have enough ram so that you don't hit swap, which
will kill performance.
Having scsi drives does not matter. The most modern PC's ship with ATA-66
interfaces, which can transfer data at 66 Mb/s, which is way more than any
hard drive you will find can handle. If you want do do things like RAID
striping, then go with SCSI, if you want to have 1-4 hard drives, then the
cheapest option is IDE, and it performs just as well as SCSI.
Drives over 4 Gb work fine, you just can not have a single file greater
than 2Gb in size on a 32bit flavor of linux, like on a PC. For linux to
boot, you need to have the kernel image below the 1023rd cylinder on the
drive, but other than that constraint, everything works fine. Take a look
at the linux documentation project, it will answer a lot of questions:
> I expect that the SGI machines would be the best, but is
> the price difference worth it? Do you need a special version
> of Linux to access the two processors?
>
All current linux kernels support SMP, so dual processors will just work.
The 320/540 have a different architecture than most pc's, so you would
need to recompile the kernel specifically for it.
> How about graphics cards? Is it correct that there are
> no Linux accelerators for the 320 hardware? A quick check
> at www.linux.net/hardware/components.html lists no graphics
> components.
>
You are correct, there are currently no hardware accelerated linux drivers
for the 320.
-- Marcin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 15:50:44 PDT