opteron 146 thoughts on motherboards

[Peter Arremann]

On Sunday 08 January 2006 21:22, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> Thanks Peter. I was just wondering, and you make some good points here
> that I haven't thought of. I'm not sure I fully understand what
> lm_sensors will give you -- is this the ability to remotely check things
> like the CPU temperature? Using SNMP? 
lm_sensors is the underlaying code for accessing SMBus implementations. SMBus 
(System Management Bus) is a very simple serial bus based on I2C that is used 
to monitor the system. What can be monitored depends on the board but usually 
its things like temperatures, voltages and fan speeds. I've seen PCI bus 
usage implemented once but unusual stuff like that is rare. 
lm_sensors implements drivers for the various SMBus controllers used on 
various boards. Ontop of that you have many different programs like gkrellm 
to do the actual monitoring for you. 

> And yes, the driver issue is an 
> interesting one. I had a tough time with the driver for the NIC until I
> installed the latest FC4 kernel. I really need to learn how to compile a
> Fedora kernel, even though in this case there wasn't the need -- it
> would have been more work.
Yeah - I warned you about that issue :-) I have a bunch of really cheap 
network cards so its no problem but it shows the issue I meant. Imagine its 
2am, you only got FC4 cd's and no spare network card... enjoy :-) 

As for the kernel rebuild - Bryan posted a link to a kernel rebuild document 
recently he has written on one of the fedora mailing lists recently. Look for 
it - it has all you need. 

> I really I don't have any complaints about the board and I like it; I'm
> glad to have saved some money while I'm still focused on applications
> programming.  I'm using it as a desktop board obviously. I am more than
> pleased with the CPU speed. I recently did an 'rpmbuild -ba' of Firefox
> 1.5 from source code that completed so quickly I didn't quite realize it.
You're so lucky. I'm stuck doing most of my work on a P4 2.4Ghz laptop with 
the slowest drive I've ever seen... Compile for my current project (small, 
just about 15000 C++ lines I've written over the past few weeks) takes almsot 
3 minutes - on my desktop FX-55 it takes about 45 seconds... 
Ordered a Dell with a Centrino Duo - but it won't be shipped till mid febrary 
*grrrr*

Peter.