A journey in installing on Itanium2....

[x-wing]

if you don't mind sharing, could you post your machine configuration? Also, how much did this cost you?
_________________
--
The more I learn about Linux, the more amazed I am that its free
--

[Chroma]

You should get your hands on intels compiler and see if that will yield some better results too.
_________________
Have kernel, will panic

[friedmud]

I don't have that machine online right now (I'm in the process of moving home for Christmas Break) - but I'll post some more of my config files real soon.

As for how much it cost me - NOTHING :-0

Work bought it for me - so it didn't cost me anything

But - if you want to know how much it cost - right around $15,000. That's a pretty large amount of cash - it almost makes me sick (that's twice as much as my car cost and I'm going to be paying on that for another couple of years!).

But I guess if you HAVE to get the job done.......

Derek

[veezi]

This a short description of my brief encounter with Itanium.

Machine is HP rx2600 (Itanium2, dual 1GHz processors, 12GB of memory, ATI Radeon 7000 video card).

Installation:
- chrooted from Redhat AS 2.1 (which came with it). The stage1 tarball worked fine.
- bootstrap and system updte worked fine.
- essentials (sysklogd, vcron, ssh, nfs) compiled properly.
- kernel 2.6.0 compiles properly (except for some weired and unneeded modules).
- most other packages that I tried compile fine when accepting the x86 keyword.

I now have kde running on that machine (without kdemultimedia which refused to compile). Everything seems Ok.

Problems:
- Couldn't get Radeon DRI to work even with X 4.3.99 (card is PCI based).
- Had to disable some USE variables to get some packages to compile.

Conclusions:
- The perceived speed of the machine doesn't differ that much from a Pentium 4! Even gcc doesn't run that fast!
- My guess is that Itaniums are not worth buying for mainstream applications. They're only good for highly computational or scientific apps, and yet they've to be optimized for it.
- I wish gentoo would handle such archs in a better way. Itaniums can *emulate* x86 and therefore we should see more packages marked ia64.

Regards,

[Paul9196]

Well you guys seem to have been able to do what I haven't so far and that is getting a recompiled kernel to boot on an itanium2 system. I have tried compiling a 2.6.1 kernel under redhat and the ia64-sources under gentoo, and both seem to generate the same kernel panic when trying to boot those kernels. This is the error:

[haugboel]

[Paul9196]

Thanks! That got it to boot at least. Now I don't have the usb keyboard and mouse working, so I've gotta try to figure that one out, and it appears the NIC didn't come up either for some reason.

Paul

[Paul9196]

Finally got it all working now. Thanks for the posts and the help.

Paul