[OpenIndiana-discuss] Which mobo allows 24 GB ram and ECC

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On 6 December 2011 00:34, Geoff Flarity <geoff.flarity at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 4, 2011 7:21 PM, "Joshua M. Clulow" <josh at sysmgr.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 5 December 2011 10:41, Geoff Flarity <geoff.flarity at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Stay away from AMD if you're hoping to use this system with KVM.
>> > There's no AMD support yet, and who knows when there will be.
>>
>> Depending on how much stuffing around you're up for, richlowe and I
>> have done some preliminary port-to-AMD work.  It works well on my HP
>> Microserver (AMD N36L CPU) and somewhat well on an older CPU in a
>> machine richlowe had access to that does not have NPT.
>>
>>  https://github.com/jclulow/illumos-kvm
>>
>> There are definitely still bugs to iron out, but it's hard to do that
>> without testers and access to more hardware.  :)
>
> Wow, this is great news guys. Thanks for your hardwork. What are the exact
> requirements in terms of amd CPU. I have an old one sitting around that I
> doubt will work but I'm willing to upgrade to help test. My mobo supports
> am2 and am3.

DISCLAIMER:  There seem to be few useful materials on this subject, so
my mapping
 of features to models may be incorrect.  Please verify independently before
 purchasing anything you can't easily return.

With that in mind, in theory you can use anything with SVM (aka
AMD-V).  Wikipedia[1] suggests:

    On May 23, 2006, AMD released the Athlon 64 ("Orleans"), the
    Athlon 64 X2 ("Windsor") and the Athlon 64 FX ("Windsor") as the
    first AMD processors to support this technology.

These earlier CPUs will invoke the "shadow paging" support in KVM.
Our port of this is improving, but is not yet perfect.  For "best
results", I suspect you would want to try something more recent, like
a Barcelona/Phenom II.  These have NPT (aka RVI), and thus do not use
the shadow paging code.


[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#AMD_virtualization_.28AMD-V.29

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
UNIX Admin/Developer
http://blog.sysmgr.org