The Operating System
With the proliferation of 32-bit Windows based benchmarks for the Opteron and Windows being our main testing platform at HEXUS, it was a nice change of pace to use something else entirely.SuSE has been a vehement supporter of AMD's 64-bit Linux push, indeed SuSE software engineers are responsible for much of the Opteron support in Linux today, so the 64-bit version of their Enterprise Server 8 was the natural choice for the testing. Armari will supply and and all of their server boxes with SuSE ES installed, including their Opteron solutions, so we duly requested that configuration with both servers.
The 64-bit version of the operating system was used for the Opteron computer, to test it in its most favourable operating environment. Able to simultaneously run 32-bit and 64-bit compiled binaries, it was a godsend for testing. The Opteron switches operating modes depending on whether executing code is flagged as requiring x86-64 ISA features. 32-bit code runs transparently in a 64-bit host operating system and it simply cannot see anything more on the processor than is provided by a current Athlon XP. The 1MB of L2 is available in 32-bit mode, but the extra GPR's, the new SIMD registers and access to anything more than 4GB of memory aren't available.
For a easy to understand look at the operating modes of Opteron, click here.
Enterprise Server 8 was used on the Xeon computer, but obviously the 32-bit i686 optimised version.
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 provides everything needed for full operation on Opteron, including an optimised kernel, optimised 64-bit binaries for many software components and a full 32-bit subsystem for running 'legacy' code or as yet unoptimised software.
I'll go over the benchmarks on the following page. For now, a few screen shots of SLES8 in operation on the Opteron.
YaST2 showing bridge info
Installing the 32-bit subsystem
Adjusting runlevel
YaST2 showing Opteron pair
Notes
I'd have loved to go in to more detail about SLES8 and talk about things like the LVM support, the Enterprise specific features, security, the 32-bit subsystem and a whole bunch of other stuff. Word count and review topic conspired against me, but don't count out a special SLES8 based article on HEXUS in the future.Also a quick thankyou to Andi Kleen, software engineer at SuSE and responsible for much of the x86-64 support in current Linux kernels, for answering some questions I had about Opteron.
