>>>>> "s" == Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
s> Apart from the other components, the main problem is to choose
s> the motherboard. The offer is incredibly high and I'm lost.
here is cut-and-paste of my shopping so far:
2008-07-18
via
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/sn10000eg -- 4 sata. $251
opteron
1U barebones: Tyan B2935G28V4H
Supermicro H8DMU+
amd opteron 2344he x2 $412
bad choice. stepping B3 needed to avoid TLB bug, xx50he or higher
amd opteron 2352 x2 $628
kingston kvr667d2d8p5/2g $440
motherboard Supermicro H8DMU+ supports steppping BA
Tyan 2915-E and other -E supports stepping BA
TYAN S3992G3NR-E $430
also avail from
https://secure.flickerdown.com/index.php?crn=290&rn=497&action=show_\
detail
phenom
phenom 9550 $175
do not get 9600. it has the B2 stepping TLB bug.
crucial CT2KIT25672AA667 x2 ~$200
ecs NFORCE6M-A(3.0) $50
downside: old, many reports of DoA, realtek ethernet according to newegg
comment?--\
-often they uselessly give the PHY model, no builtin video?!
ASRock ALiveNF7G or ABIT AN-M2HD $85
nforce ethernet, builtin video, relatively new (2007-09) chip. downside:
slow HT \
bus?
This is **NOT** very helpful to you because none of it is tested with
OpenSolaris. There are a few things to consider:
* can you possibly buy something, and then bury it in the sand for a
year? or two years if you want it to work with the stable Solaris build.
or maybe replace a Linux box with new hardware, and run
OpenSolaris on the old hardware?
* look on wikipedia to see the stepping of the AMD chip you're
looking at. some steppings of the quad-core chips are
unfashionable.
* may have better hardware support in SXCE, because OpenSolaris can
only include closed-source drivers which are freely
redistributable. It includes a lot of closed drivers, but maybe
you'll get some more with SXCE, particularly for SATA chips.
Unfortunately I don't know one page where you can get a quick view
of the freedom status of each driver. I think it is hard even to
RTFS because some of the drivers are in different ``gates'' than
the main one, but I'm not sure. I care about software freedom and
get burned on this repeatedly. And there are people in here a couple
times asking for Marvell source to fix a lockup bug or add hotplug,
and they cannot get it. </rant off>
* the only network card which works well is the Intel gigabit cards.
All the other cards, if they work, it is highly dependent on which
exact stepping, revision, and PHY of the chip you get whether the
card will work at all, and whether or not it'll have serious
performance problems. but intel cards, copper, fiber, new, old,
3.3V, 5V, PCI-e, have a much better shot of working than the
broadcom 57xx, via, or realtek. i was planning to try an nForce on
the cheap desktop board and hope for luck, then put an intel card
in the slow 33mhz pci slot if it doesn't work.
* a lot of motherboards on newegg say they have a ``realtek'' gigabit
chip, but that's just because they're idiots. It's really an
nForce gigabit chip, with a realtek PHY. i don't know if this
works well.
* it sounds like the only SATA card that works well with Solaris is
the LSI mpt board. There have been reports of problems and poor
performance with basically everything else, and in particular the
AMD northbridge (that's why I picked less-open NVidia chips above).
the supermicro marvell card his highly sensitive to chipset? or
BIOS? revisions. maybe the Sil3124 is okay, I dont know. I have
been buying sil3124 from newegg, though they've been through two
chip steppings silently in the last 6months. In any case, you
should plan on plugging your disks into a PCI card, not the
motherboard, so that you can try a few differnet cards when the
first one starts locking up for 2s every 5min, or locking up all
the ports when a bad disk is attached to one port, or giving really
slow performance, some other weird bullshit.
* the server boards are nice for solaris because:
+ they can have 3.3V PCI slots, so you can use old boards (which
have working drivers) on a 64-bit 100mhz bus. The desktop boards
will give you a fast interface only in PCIe format, not PCI.
+ they take 4x as much memory as desktop (2x as much per CPU, and 2
CPUs), though you do have to buy ``registered/buffered'' memory instead
of ``unregistered/unbuffered'')
+ the chipsets demanded by quad-core are older, I think, and maybe
more likely to work. It is even possible to get LSI mpt onboard
with some of them, but maybe it is the wrong stepping of mpt or
something.
* the nVidia boards with 6 sata ports have only 4 useable sata ports.
the other two ports are behind some kind of goofyraid controller.
anyway, plan on running your disks off a PCI card, and plan on trying
a few PCI cards before you find a good one which is still in production.
* maybe you should instead get an intel board with onboard intel
gigabit, more RAM than possible with AMD desktop boards, and a very
conservative AHCI chip. I'm not shopping for intel myself, but
objectively it is probably the better plan. :(
the problem is that the latest quad-core AMD CPU's need an extremely
new motherboard to supply their split power plane, or work around
BA/B3 CPU stepping errata, or something, and the new motherboards you
are forced to get (including the ones above) have new chipsets that
probably won't work well.
so, someone else go buy them and let me know before I spend
anything. :) If it doesnt work, just run Linux and iSCSI Enterprise
Target on it. (you can get disk encryption that way too)
this is in fact what I do, sorta. There is an advantage for
availability. A lot of times when a disk goes bad, it screws up the
controller, the driver, or the whole storage stack. With iSCSI, that
whole tower containing the bad disk becomes unresponsive. but I have
a 280R mirroring disks distributed across two peecees, so the pool
stays up in spite of this astonishingly low software quality in the
Linux SATA stack! Then you have to take the bad tower away from
Solaris, forget about all this fancy FMD stuff, and baby that machine
until it finally admits which drive is the bad one. The
so-far-unsolveable downside is, iSCSI is extrememly slow. It's
basically unuseable during a scrub, and a scrub of a few terabytes can
take days, and scrubs need to be done. Also it's complicated to keep
track of three different dynamically-chosen names for a single disk.
so you should probably try for a direct-attached SATA setup.
ENJOY!
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