Joe Landman wrote:
Eric Thibodeau wrote:
Advantage of modules is you can upgrade them without upgrading the
kernel. Go ahead, build in that e1000 driver. I dare yah... :(
Ok...I didn't put enought emphasis on "main" stuff....as in, _all you
need to get the system booted, which essentially means HDD chipset
drivers, the rest I do build as a module (NIC, video and such).
More to the point it does give some good flexibility for end users
with a need to keep the core "separate" from the drivers for
maintenance.
Initrd is subtle and quick to anger. One must use burnt offerings
to placate the spirits of initrd.
LOL!
... now I don't mean hardware burnt offerings ... smoke rising from
your motherboard may not placate the spirits of initrd, they
definitely may impede further operations ...
Oh...you mean something like this:
http://wiki.neuralbs.com/~kyron/WrongSpecs/dsc00883.jpg
Well, it would be a heck of a lot nicer if the tools were a little
more forgiving ... Oh you don't have this driver in your initrd ...
ok ... PANIC (mwahahahaha)
Pahahahahah... Point in case, I am building a CD-only cluster system
(based on Gentoo) and I am currently _NOT_ using initrd because all
that really needs to be built in is NFSroot support an all NICs I
care to put in. Obviously this is a deprecated approach but it's
proven to be the most effective and easy to maintain in my case.
We build an integrated NFSroot and e1000 and a few other things for a
customer. Fixed hardware for their cluster. From bare-metal-off to
operational infiniband compute node in ~45-60 seconds (I say 45, but a
few things took a little longer to start, like SGE).
Hey, weren't you the one complaining about e1000 "Go ahead, build in
that e1000 driver. I dare yah"? I haven't seen "moving hardware"...oh,
wait, yes I have, our cluster is on wheels (dig a little and you'll see
it)! How many nodes?
[...snip...]
Most of the arguments I have heard are "oh but its compiled with
-O3" or whatever. Any decent HPC code person will tell you that that
is most definitely not a guaranteed way to a faster system ...
Hey...as I stated above, one would have to be quite silly to claim
-O3 as the all well and all good optimization solution. At least you
can rest assured your solutions will add up correctly with GCC. To get a
Well, sometimes. You still need to be careful with it.
This said, I am not sure icc/pgi/... are uniformly better than gcc. I
did an admittedly tiny study of this http://scalability.org/?p=470
some time ago. What I found was the gcc really held its own. It did
a very good job on a very simple test case.
This is worth a new thread ;)
Then again, the fortran version was simply faster than the C version,
but that can be explained ... by ... er ... ah ... something.
"faster" system, you really have to look at your app, use strace,
ltrace and gprof, then you can play with that. What I _am_ saying
though is that Gentoo _does_ empower the administrator by giving him
the ability to customize the OS if a bottleneck is to be identified.
Yup. There is nothing like a profile of an app running the code, to
see where it is spending its time to decide between code shifts and
algorithmic shifts.
(gcc-4.3.1, or ICC ;) ) _integrated_ into your system (not a hackish
Er... We often use several different compilers in several different
trees. Several gccs, pgi, icc, eieio ... you name it. All are
integrated.
Are-you currently able to run GCC-4.3.x versions on your current setup,
Currently running 4.2.3-2ubuntu7 on my laptop. Other machines
(development box) has something like 4 different gccs there. I
haven't tried 4.3.x yet ... had planned to, but work gets in the way.
Tell me when you get it going, it's for 4.3.x that I had to upgrade
glibc. As a ref: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218603
I'm actually eager to know. I'm still living under the ASSumption od
binary distributions not coping too well with multi-library
environments. Point in case, one of my colleagues _really_ wanted
No, our systems (Ubuntu, SuSE, Centos) seem to have no real problems
apart from the occasional broken hard wired /usr/lib with the wrong
ABI in a configure/make file. Usually easy to fix.
Ok, those are the general problems I would hit and I had switched to
Gentoo before starting to use SRPMs.
firefox 3 on his ubuntu system. The installer trickled down to having
to uninstall glibc...and he forced it to YES (and this is just a
browser, not something that is used to _make_ code and would be tied
to glibc)
Hmmm... I have firefox 3 on this system (64 bit) and I run icecat for
32 bit access (java and other things). No glibc changes (apart from
security patches). He must have done something horribly wrong. We
have multiple mixed ABI ubuntu/centos/suse systems, and haven't had
issues.
Curious...maybe he has an _old_ Ubuntu install...something like 6.0 series.
afterthought of an RPM that pulls in a new glibc that breaks the
install
Er ... not the slightest clue as to what you are talking about. I
haven't seen gcc, icc, pgi, ... touch our glibc.
Maybe I am missing the fun. Which ICC version is this? Which gcc
is this, which glibc is this?
Sorry about that I might have been misleading, GCC is generally the
one most sensitive to glibc, not the other ones although the latest
ICC (10.1.x series) do claim compatibility with the GNU environment
so it might get a little more dependency there.
We have installed the 10.1.015 on customer machines from Centos 5.2
through SuSE 10.x through Ubuntu with nary a problem. Very different
glibc's. No issues with code generation.
I am sorry I mixed up glibc with GCC whilst talking about ICC's
compatibility, this one is specific to gcc and icc on the same system
and the (re)definition of atomic functions which ICC couldn't follow
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201596
Never hit that?
Binary distributions aren't evil. They do work, quite well in most
cases.
I switched to Gentoo in 2004 and never looked back, and I should because
4years is a long time in the distribution world. I did switch my laptop
users to Kubuntu but I still find the distribution annoys me.
Cheers!
Eric
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
