Gilboa Davara writes:
I'm using Fedora Core on a Tyan Thunder K8WE with two Opteron 270 CPUs. AFAIR the Sun Fire uses the same AMD south-bridge as my Tyan board. More-ever, I've got a number of HP 385 machines that use the exact chipset configuration as the Sun machine, running FC and CentOS; in both cases no stability issues what-so-ever. In short, it should work out of the box.
I would advise caution when running an Opteron platform. It's been my impression that, over time, far more problems crop up on x86_64 than on IA-32 platforms. I'm running both, and, for the last couple of years, I've many more issues with my Opteron machine than with the Pentium ones. x86_64 really gets less overall testing than IA-32, and that's the results you get.
Even though things work fine now, any minor kernel rev can suddenly turn out to be broken for your specific chipset combination, while other combinations of Opteron chipsets and hardware work fine. Right now, for example, the latest kernel I can boot on my dual-Opteron 240 box is 2.6.13. All later kernels trigger some bizarre bug that apparently results from my specific combination of RAID-1 and Adaptec SCSI controller. Before I can make much progress with booting, kernels 2.6.14 and later begin spewing "SCSI transmission timeout" errors. 9 times out of 10 the arrays get degraded, and I have to scramble back to 2.6.13 and rebuild.
The IA-32 box standing next to it, also running RAID-1 and Adaptec SCSI, happily eats 2.6.15, without complaints.
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