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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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isainfo(1)                                                         User Commands                                                        isainfo(1)

NAME
isainfo - describe instruction set architectures SYNOPSIS
isainfo [ [-v] [-b | -n | -k] | [-x]] DESCRIPTION
The isainfo utility is used to identify various attributes of the instruction set architectures supported on the currently running system. Among the questions it can answer are whether 64-bit applications are supported, or whether the running kernel uses 32-bit or 64-bit device drivers. When invoked with no options, isainfo prints the name(s) of the native instruction sets for applications supported by the current version of the operating system. These are a subset of the list returned by isalist(1). The subset corresponds to the basic applications environ- ments supported by the currently running system. OPTIONS
The following options are supported: -b Prints the number of bits in the address space of the native instruction set. -k Prints the name of the instruction set(s) used by the operating system kernel components such as device drivers and STREAMS mod- ules. -n Prints the name of the native instruction set used by portable applications supported by the current version of the operating sys- tem. -v When used with the- b, -k or -n options, prints more detailed information. -x Prints instruction extensions to the native ABI which are supported by the platform. EXAMPLES
Example 1: Invoking isainfo on a 32-bit x86 Platform The following example invokes isainfo on a 32-bit x86 platform: example% isainfo -v 32-bit i386 applications example% isainfo -k i386 Example 2: Invoking isainfo on a System Running the 64-bit Operating System on a 64-bit SPARC Processor The following example invokes isainfo on a system running the 64-bit operating system on a 64-bit SPARC processor: example% isainfo sparcv9 sparc example% isainfo -n sparcv9 example% isainfo -v 64-bit sparcv9 applications 32-bit sparc applications example% isainfo -vk 64-bit sparcv9 kernel modules Example 3: Invoking isainfo -x on an AMD Opteron CPU The following example invokes isainfo with the -x option on an AMD Opteron CPU: example% isainfo -x i386: fpu tsc cx8 sep cmov mmx ammx a3dnow a3dnowx fxsr sse sse2 pause EXIT STATUS
Non-zero Options are not specified correctly, or the command is unable to recognize attributes of the system on which it is running. An error message is printed to stderr. ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
isalist(1), uname(1), psrinfo(1M), sysinfo(2), attributes(5), isalist(5) SunOS 5.10 20 Jul 2004 isainfo(1)
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