I am really keen to build a shiny new dual opteron with terabyte RAID-5 storage for home use. Before forking out the cash, I thought that I would splurge $200 on ebay and build up an SMP laboratory first to get some experience on high-end kit.
So, I picked up some old dual PII motherboards from ebay, and I thought it might be time to build them up and have a play.
First test board is a Soyo 5TH, with a pair of 166MHz Pentia (Pentii ??) loaded.
It has 4 EDO slots - so I fully populated it with some spare EDO to get a whopping 48MB RAM !!
Loaded RedHat 9.0 - setup as server with a few simple extras turned on (mysql , ssh, rexec, etc). Took ages to load - so I just left it running in the spare room for a while. After the football, it appeared to be complete, boots up and runs fine.
Problems / Questions :
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- On boot, Bios detects a pair of Pentia at the correct frequency.
- Linux does not appear to be running in SMP mode
- Top shows stats for 1 CPU only, but there are is an extra line of details on the MEM line - dont have it in front of me so I cannot recall what the details are. Could it be that a server install of RH provides a more detailed top than a workstation version ???
- /proc/cpuinfo only dumps info for 1 CPU
Hypothesis:
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- That I need a special SMP kernel with RedHat 9 ? I thought that late model 2.4 kernels had SMP by default .. have RedHat performed some trickery here ?
- That I need to use ECC EDO Ram - if linux finds non ECC RAM it disables the 2nd CPU ?? True or False - Im just guessing here
- That 48 MB RAM is way too pathetic for Linux to go into SMP mode. There is a minimum quantity of RAM needed to go into SMP mode. True or False - just guessing again.
Tests:
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Cant test any more hypothesis for a while until new supplies reach the lab - I have some big 32MB EDO's coming in, and also some ECC EDOs on their way.
To test the RedHat-kernel-is-bad hypothesis, I need to free up some disk space or transfer a kernel over the LAN. (not enough room for gcc or kernel source on this machine).
Cannot try out the Dual PII-90 until I get more supplies - I put it together and when I went to connect the IDE cables .. guess what .. no IDE connectors WTF ? This board has originally had an EISA SCSI card - wow ! I have a PCI SCSI card arriving soon, and I have a draw full of ancient 50pin SCSI drives, so it will live eventually.
I also have a $25 Monster HP netserver LHPro with dual PentiumPro 200's and a populated SCSI array - way cool machine that is larger and noisier than my car. Cannot proceed here yet until I snag me some 3.3V ECC SDRAM's - the netserver requires ECC chips or wont post. I thought that maybe this ECC memory thing was a general requirement for any SMP machine .. True or False ?
Looking forward to any answers - it is not an easy one to google for
