Athlon 64 X2 as Server progress
In the other thread I made some claims based upon believing things I read. Now that I am actually building it I want to update everyone on what the reality of it is.
I'll start by saying that it is not nearly turning out as well as I thought it would - yet. It turns out that what I'm doing is a lot more bleading edge than I thought. But - I am making progress so listen up.
I had the illusion that a 64 bit operating system running on dual 64 bit cores wouldn't have any issues addressing 4 gigs of ram. WRONG!!!
The board I picked - and this is just for my one server - is the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium. Why this board? I certuanly don't need dual video cards, in fact I installed an old 32 meg PCI card. I wish it had video on the motherboard, but it doesn't. But I like ASUS and this board was touted as X2 ready. It also had 4 of the 3 gigabit SATA II ports which is also bleading edge. I bought 4 Kingston KHX3200/1GR ram sticks to take it up to 4 gigs. This was after going through some bad Rosewill ram I got from NewEgg.
These boards talk to 2 gigs of ram just fine - but when you go to 4 gigs you run into problems that remind me of the old 640k days and the 1 megabyte barrier. Some stuff like Video memory and PCI stuff have to me mapped into low menory and the board wanted to basically waste a gig of ram showing only 3 gigs available.
That was not something that I was happy with.
This board did have a memory remapping feature that allowed ram to be moved to above the 4 gig barrier opening up a hole for the devices to live in. And it worked - sort of. The system showed 4 gigs available - but when I started using it - the server would crash. After many memory tests and all kinds of swapping - it was rock solid with 2 gigs but with 4 gigs and mapping - it died.
It wasn't quite a kernel panic. It was a lot of gibberish with file system SATA_NV errors. Loading the file system was what made the crash occur.
After a lot of research I tried downloading the 2.6.13 kernel andrecompiling it myself. I don't know if it was the options I picked or if they fixed a bug in the new kernel - but it fixed the problem. I now have 4 gigs of ram.
