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Special Forums Hardware Hardware compatibility advice wanted. Post 302514709 by Varsel on Sunday 17th of April 2011 05:55:21 PM
Old 04-17-2011
Okay...good enough!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
I was an early adopter to dual-core (well, dual processor) x86 64-bit computing. I had a 64-bit SMP/NUMA Opteron 242 system up and working back when most 64-bit Linux distributions were still a dysfunctional mess. Since then I've worked with many kinds of multiple-core processors, mobile and desktop versions, Intel and AMD, running 32-bit and 64-bit Linux kernels.

I maintain that the board and the peripherals are more important than the processor sitting in it. Your processor is an x86_64 compatible like everything else on the market, and ordinary 32-bit or 64-bit kernels will load on it. Whether it can do anything with it once loaded depends heavily on the system hardware and firmware; I got 64-bit Linux booting on my Opteron the very first try, the difficult bit was getting the disk controller drivers to work!

This is even frequently true for internal CPU features! Plenty of things like advanced CPU power-management modes, integrated thermal sensors, dual channel, integrated memory controllers, CPU chipset features, etc. only work if the manufacturer bothers hooking up the right wires. Frequently they don't, or just a small subset, to reduce size or cost or just to stratify the market. Ever see a laptop without C-states? Dell's sold a few.

IOW: Knowing your CPU doesn't even begin to tell you what you need to know about your system. Having a Phenom or Phenom II means you've probably got hypervisor support, if that matters to you.

So let's say you wanted to build PC having three dedicated hard disk drives (one for XP Pro, one for PC-BSD 8.1, and on for Linux Mint 7). I'm hearing on other forums that either CPU, motherboard/chipset, graphic card, etc., must support all three operating systems...or Linux Mint, XP Pro, & PC-BSD must have drivers for each component used in the PC. Not sure which is correct. Anyway, how do you determine which specific components will either run all three operating systems at optimal ability...or at least be compatible with all three?
 

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IOSTAT(1)						      General Commands Manual							 IOSTAT(1)

NAME
iostat - report I/O statistics SYNOPSIS
iostat [ drives ] [ interval [ count ] ] DESCRIPTION
Iostat iteratively reports the number of characters read and written to terminals per second, and, for each disk, the number of transfers per second, kilobytes transferred per second, and the milliseconds per average seek. It also gives the percentage of time the system has spent in user mode, in user mode running low priority (niced) processes, in system mode, and idling. To compute this information, for each disk, seeks and data transfer completions and number of words transferred are counted; for terminals collectively, the number of input and output characters are counted. Also, each sixtieth of a second, the state of each disk is examined and a tally is made if the disk is active. From these numbers and given the transfer rates of the devices it is possible to determine average seek times for each device. The optional interval argument causes iostat to report once each interval seconds. The first report is for all time since a reboot and each subsequent report is for the last interval only. The optional count argument restricts the number of reports. If more than 4 disk drives are configured in the system, iostat displays only the first 4 drives, with priority given to Massbus disk drives (i.e. if both Unibus and Massbus drives are present and the total number of drives exceeds 4, then some number of Unibus drives will not be displayed in favor of the Massbus drives). To force iostat to display specific drives, their names may be supplied on the command line. FILES
/dev/kmem /vmunix SEE ALSO
vmstat(1) 4th Berkeley Distribution April 29, 1985 IOSTAT(1)
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