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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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CFDISK(8)							 GNU fdisk Manual							 CFDISK(8)

NAME
GNU fdisk, lfdisk, gfdisk - manipulate partition tables on a hard drive SYNOPSIS
fdisk [options] [device] DESCRIPTION
fdisk is a disk partition manipulation program, which allows you to create, destroy, resize, move and copy partitions on a hard drive using a menu-driven interface. It is useful for organising the disk space on a new drive, reorganising an old drive, creating space for new oper- ating systems, and copying data to new hard disks. For a list of the supported partition types, see the --list-partition-types option below. It comes in two variants, gfdisk and lfdisk. Lfdisk aims to resemble Linux fdisk 2.12, while gfdisk supports more advanced disk operations, like resizing the filesystem, moving and copying partitions. When starting fdisk, the default is to run gfdisk. OPTIONS
-h, --help displays a help message. -v, --version displays the program's version. -L, --linux-fdisk turns on Linux fdisk compatibility mode. This is the same as running lfdisk. -G, --gnu-fdisk turns off Linux fdisk compatibility mode. -i, --interactive where necessary, prompts for user intervention. -p, --script never prompts for user intervention. -l, --list lists the partition table on the specified device and exits. If there is no device specified, lists the partition tables on all detected devices. -r, --raw-list displays a hex dump of the partition table of the disk, similar to the way Linux fdisk displays the raw data in the partition table. -u, --sector-units use sectors, instead of cylinders for a default unit. -s, --size=DEVICE prints the size of the partition on DEVICE is printed on the standard output. -t, --list-partition-types displays a list of supported partition types and features. The following options are available only to lfdisk. -b, --sector-size=SIZE Specify the sector size of the disk. Valid values are 512, 1024 and 2048. Should be used only on older kernels, which don't guess the correct sector size. -C, --cylinders=CYLINDERS Specify the number of cylinders of the disk. Currently does nothing, it is left for Linux fdisk compatibility. -H, --heads=HEADS Specify the number of heads of the disk. Reasonable values are 255 or 16. -S, --sectors=SECTORS Specify the number of sectors per track. A reasonable value is 63. BUGS
Before editing a BSD disklabel, the partition with the disklabel should already exist on the disk and be detected by the OS. If you have created a BSD-type partition, you need to write the changes to the disk. If fdisk fails to notify the OS about the changes in partition ta- ble, you need to restart your computer. As fdisk tries to guess the device holding the BSD disklabel, it might fail to edit it at all, even if the OS has detected it. In this case you are adviced to simply open the device with fdisk directly. It is possible that it doesn't work on some operating systems. Getting the size of a partition with -s might fail, if fdisk fails to guess the disk device, for the same reasons as with the previous bug. SEE ALSO
mkfs(8), cfdisk(8), parted(8) The fdisk program is fully documented in the info(1) format GNU fdisk User Manual manual. fdisk 18 August, 2006 CFDISK(8)
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