Subject: Re: Linux on H70 ?
tom_gall@vnet.ibm.com
Date: Wed Jun 21 2000 - 05:28:52 MDT
Patrick Berge wrote:
>
> > H70 is not a Power3, it's a Northstar. But it's worth a try regards.
>
> Hmm well Tom, you mentioned Northstar (aka RS64 II) ?, so what about Pulsar
> (RS64III) or even Apache (RS64)? I see the S70A (Northstar) and S80 (Pulsar) are
> listed on your web page as unsupported. Does that mean Linux is planned for them
> and not for Apache?
Hi Patrick!
Here's the way I would say it. The goal of our PowerPC Linux team is to extend
linux support as far as possible across the line. There are several factors that
limit how far we can get. The primary ones are we only have so many people and
we don't have access to each and every piece of hardware.
That said, we've started from the bottom and are working our way up.
So the long and the short of it is, no promises, but I hope we can get far.
> Anyway I would be very interested to see if any of these beasts would boot
> especially an Apache based S80 . What are the SP issues if any with these high
> end machines?
SMP is an interesting animal. I have a 2 way POWER3 box in my office and that
seems to work relitively well. However as you add more processors this does push
the limits on the SMP support in the kernel. Linux at the moment (2.2.x) wasn't
really meant to scale past 4 processors the way the locks are designed amoung
other things.
However this isn't to say that linux can't run on a
ultra-wiz-bang-lots-of-processors really cool box. It can. There are just
limits.
I know we certainly hope that as we're building the 64 bit ppc linux kernel
that it'll scale on the higher end. But that's a work in progress so we'll see
what the future holds.
Regards,
Tom
-- Tom Gall - PowerPC Linux Team "Where's the ka-boom? There was Linux Technology Center supposed to be an earth (w) tom_gall@vnet.ibm.com shattering ka-boom!" (w) 507-253-4558 -- Marvin Martian (h) tgall@uswest.net http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/linux
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