[K12OSN] Just got approval

[Eric Harrison]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Robert Arkiletian wrote:

>I have 3 questions:
>
>1)
>I know Nvidia has dropped binary driver support for the Riva 128. But xfree86 
>has support for the Riva 128 with the nv3 driver. Fortunately, I only need 2D 
>acceleration. However, nvidia has a note about the Riva 128

I used to use a Riva-based card in one of my test terminals. I don't 
recall ever having a problem with it.

>2)
>The NIC's in the clients are 3com 3c905-TX pci cards. I am going to use 
>rom-o-matic to etherboot the clients from the floppy drive. Wondering if 
>anyone has had problems with this setup?

Should not be a problem (3com ISA cards took some fiddling to work,
the PCI cards work out of the box).

>3)
>What's the ETA on kernel 2.6 to K12LTSP? I ask because I am thinking of using 
>SATA instead of SCSI. Also, contemplating if I need SATA RAID or if I should 
>just buy 2 drives and put /home on one and / on the other. If I go RAID I 
>will buy a 3ware 8000 series Escalade true raid card. Anyone have this setup?

We're a month  or two out for the first "real" kernel 2.6-based K12LTSP
beta. With a few hacks I have FC2T1+rawhide mostly working right now ;-)

The question of SCSI vs SATA is in discussion/testing right now. In the
initial round of testing, U320 SCSI drives are 50% faster in random I/O
than SATA drives (36G, 10k rpm drives in both cases). Random I/O is what
makes or breaks terminal servers.

SATA appears to be much better that PATA, but as far as I can tell fast
SCSI drives are still the best deal for mid-to-large terminal servers.


-Eric