Re: [SLE] Does upgrading motherboard/CPU actually work? Also, 64bit vs. 32bit....

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Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 06:52:52 +0100
To: suse-linux-e@suse.com

Rafael E. Herrera wrote:

> Preston Crawford wrote:
>
>> I've never done this before with any OS so I'm a little wary in general.
>> But I have a P3 800 that I'm thinking of upgrading as prices are really
>> low and I have a little money right now. Is it a fairly trouble-free
>> process to install a new motherboard/CPU on an existing install or do
>> you have to reinstall the OS? As I've never done this before I have no
>> idea how it will turn out, if SuSE will recognize the new hardware and
>> just deal with it or if it will be looking for old hardware when it
>> boots and be unable to readjust. Thoughts on this?
>
>
> over time I've gone from AMD K6 to P3 to Athlon XP to Athlon 64 and
> back (today)
> to an Athlon XP again.
>
> If your hard drives are hanging from the regular IDE controller, swapping
> mobos should be no problem. Afterwards, you'll need to run Yast2 to
> reinstall the drivers for your network adapter, sound controller, etc.
> If you go from P3 to AMD, you'll need to re-install the kernel, but do it
> last, make sure it works with the older kernel.
>
>> Also, if I decide to do it, is there any advantage to going 64bit?
>> Obviously that would require a reinstall, but I'm curious, though. Since
>> I have a 64-bit OS it's pretty tempting. Are there any performance gains
>> to be had over 32-bit? For help in answering this I'm a
>> java/web/database developer. So that + reading email, ripping MP3s,
>> burning CDs, browsing, etc. are what I mainly use this computer for. Any
>> advice is appreciated.
>
>
> 64bit is being taunted as giving you higher performance. Note that these
> are new motherboards, they may not be supported 100%.
>
> I bought an MSI board with an AMD 64 3000, it comes with two SATA
> controllers and 4 IDE ports (one set by Promise, the other set by
> VIA). Both
> SATA controllers are supported by suse, but the Promise IDE controller
> was
> not and I could not get IDE drives on that bus to work. In fact, after
> removing the drives my system would not boot (plugging the drives back in
> allowed the system to boot, a pain in the ass). I swapped the MSI
> board in
> and kept my suse 9.0 installation intact. I did not see an appreciable
> performance improvement. I even tried a new installation on a separate
> partition of the 64bit version of Suse 9.1, I couldn't feel a big
> difference,
> but i didn't use it much.
>
> I decided to go back to an Athlon system. I write software, too late I
> realized that developing on the 64bit system, it would give me
> 64bit-processor
> only binaries. In our company we don't use 64 bit systems, and I don't
> have
> the time to set my system up to cross-compile for 32bit processors.
> Since you
> develop databases, make sure your applications will not have portability
> issues if you go for a 64 bit system.
>
> Another potential problem are general applications ported to 64 bit
> systems.
> There may be subtle issues with some software packages compiled for
> 64bits.
> I don't know of any at the moment, but I'm not up-to-date on that topic.
>
> The bottom line is that swapping mobos is not terribly difficult, just
> pick the right board for you.
>
I have both this 32-bit Athlon XP3000+ box and a 64-bit XP3000+ laptop,
same amount of memory, but the laptop has 1024K cache as opposed to 512K
on the 32-bit box, so that may make a difference. I can start a kernel
compile on the 32-bit more than 5 minutes ahead of the 64-bit laptop and
the laptop will finish a goodly 2 minutes before the 32-bit box. The
cache is double the size, but the processor speed is only 1800Mhz on the
laptop, 2200 on the 32-bit box.
There is a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit apps and the blurb says you can
expect no degrading of performance on 32-bit apps, which indicates that
you won't see 32-bit apps running any faster.
Building from sources -- still a number of apps don't build, probably a
SuSE thing, suddenly it will be linking with libraries in /usr/lib64,
/lib64, etc., i.e with libsuffix=64, then it heads off into /usr/lib and
complains it can't find a library that's only in /usr/lib64. I had a guy
from SuSE on here who suggested I try everything I'd already tried, then
the guy who said he built the 64-bit apps was on, he said everything
should build fine, if you blah-de-blah, I said now way, haven't seen him
on since. May be 9.2 will straighten that out.
I've often wondered if there are similar problems in other distros, but
I've not been able to find any via google.
Regards
Sid.

-- 
Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer
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• Previous message: Rikard Johnels: "Re: [SLE] getting rar to work..."
• In reply to: Rafael E. Herrera: "Re: [SLE] Does upgrading motherboard/CPU actually work? Also, 64bit vs. 32bit...."
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