Dear Linux guru,

I need to make a highest performance x86-64 PC and PC server (dual
socket) with CentOS 4.8 (RHEL 4.8).
I do think about Core i7 MB's compatibility?

Does anybody have an experience using Core i7 PC and servers with
CentOS 4.8.

Volodymyr

On Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:57:20 -0800, eWolf wrote:

> Dear Linux guru,
> 
> I need to make a highest performance x86-64 PC and PC server (dual
> socket) with CentOS 4.8 (RHEL 4.8).
> I do think about Core i7 MB's compatibility?
> 
> Does anybody have an experience using Core i7 PC and servers with CentOS
> 4.8.
> 
> Volodymyr

Why 4.8 instead of 5.4? 

Assuming that you have some software that really needs 4.8 then you 
should consider using a VM. VMs allow you to separate the hardware and 
software compatibility problems. It sounds like you are planning on using 
a server motherboard which means that it will probably be supported by 
RHEL 5.4/CentOS 5.4. 5.4 includes KVM which has excellent performance, my 
measurements put it at least 95% of native performance. You can put a 4.8 
VM on top of 5.4 which will give you the software compatibility that you 
need without restricting your hardware choices. I use CentOS 5.4 VMs on 
top of Fedora 12. My compute servers use desktop motherboards which 
generally aren't supported by CentOS until they are a year or two old. 
Fedora always has the very latest kernel so it's capable of running on 
everything. Before F11 I used VMware Server because KVM wasn't mature 
enough, as of F11 KVM's performance exceeded VMware's so I switched to 
it. The F11 version of KVM had excellent Linux VM performance but the 
Windows performance was still poor, the F12 version of KVM fixed the 
Windows performance issues. CentOS 5.4 probably has the same version of 
KVM as F11 so you should be able to run a 4.8 VM at almost native speeds. 
If you find that your systems can't run CentOS 5.4 natively then the 
solution would be to use Fedora 12 until CentOS catches up with the 
hardware. The VMs are the same for CentOS and Fedora so it will be no 
problem maintaining your environment if you do have to do an F12 to 
CentOS 5.5 migration later. BTW there are no stability issues with F12 
when you use it as a server. The things that break in Fedora are the 
desktop applications which you aren't using anyway. As a server you won't 
even be using X most of the time, just the kernel and the shells.

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 23:57 -0800, eWolf wrote:
> Dear Linux guru,
> 
> I need to make a highest performance x86-64 PC and PC server (dual
> socket) with CentOS 4.8 (RHEL 4.8).
> I do think about Core i7 MB's compatibility?

Should be fine.
I have a dual X5550 system... but it's now running ESX 4.

> 
> Does anybody have an experience using Core i7 PC and servers with
> CentOS 4.8.

I wouldn't think there'd be much problem, but IMHO, Red Hat
was clueless about the enterprise until RHEL 5.  Not sure why
you'd want 4.8.

Also, it is VERY likely that CPU is not the stumbling block
anymore.  You're more likely to be hampered by storage performance
and/or network performance.  Just fyi.

A good fibre attach SAN should be able to do 800MB/s or more
and possibly have IOPS into the high thousands.  Consider SSD
if you want more than that.

Network wise, you'll be wanting at least gigabit and get 10
gigabit if you can.... but you'll want to read up on 10
gig a bit before making the jump.