VanLUG Email Archive
Depends what sort of figures you're looking for -- it's really dependent
on your application. I've been following the linux-smp list for a while
and pricing out SMP systems, and pretty much it appears that most of the
name brand motherboards work just fine, and if your application/system
can parallelize you'll get speedup pretty much linear with the number of
processors (IO bus bottlenecks will slow you down though).
Version 2.0 kernels use pretty coarse kernel locking, so your speedup
may not be as high as with current 2.1 kernels. Fine grained locking is
more difficult, however, so they're still debugging a few problems in
the 2.1 series before 2.2 comes out.
> Anyone using the Asus P2BDS, PII with SMP Linux with good and bad
> experiences.
Is this the older 66MHz bus board? That was the main board I was
considering, and from what I've seen on the list it should do just
fine. There were some problems with the onboard Adaptec drivers, but
they got adopted by a new hacker, and Adaptec has become more open to
the Linux community, so the problems are either solved or being fixed as
we speak.
Linus recently posted about receiving a new 4-way PII-400 from Intel and
apparently it did a full kernel compile in just over a minute.
My own purchase plans are on hold until at least the 4-way 100MHz boards
stabilize. I figure I may only get a pair of the 66MHz processors to
start with, but a year down the road 400MHz CPUs will be cheaper than
266MHz ones are today, I can pop four of them into it and it'll still be
a screamer a year after buying it. That would be hard to say about most
any other computer, even with a CPU upgrade. :)
Just for reference, as of last spring you could get a 2-way 266MHz PII
system with a pair of 3GB SCSI drives, a TR-4 tape, 256MB memory, a
couple 10/100 ethernet cards, and the usual tidbits for about C$4k with
taxes.
Brian.