Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 released
| From: | Gaël Duval <gduval-AT-mandrakesoft.com> | |
| To: | LWN.net <lwn-AT-lwn.net> | |
| Subject: | Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 is available! | |
| Date: | Wed, 05 May 2004 00:51:48 +0200 |
Altadena, CA; Paris; France - May, 4th 2004 - Mandrakesoft today announced the availability of Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for the AMD64 platform (Athlon64 and Opteron). Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64 delivers all the features and robustness of Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official to the 64-bit platform from AMD, with an average performance gain of 20% compared to the IA32 version. Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for Athlon(TM)64 and Opteron(TM) processors provides everything needed for the most demanding computing requirements. More than just a powerful desktop system, this innovative new release offers high-end features such as world-class server capabilities and comprehensive development tools. Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 is an ideal solution for data-intensive tasks such as high-performance databases, video/audio/3D processing, and for applications that require mathematical precision and accuracy. Speed and High-Performance: Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64 is optimized to take full advantage of the powerful features offered by AMD's next-generation 64-bit architecture. Linux software for AMD64 is on average 20% faster than a traditional 32-bit system, yet maintains complete compatibility with existing 32-bit applications. Details about Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64 are available online at: http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/10/amd64 Product details: * Contents: Four CDs * Price: 119.90 EUR / $129.90 USD * Availability: VARs + pre-orders available at Mandrakestore: http://www.mandrakestore.com All Mandrakestore.com AMD64 pre-orders benefit from a 15% rebate, 20% for Mandrakeclub Standard Members and above, 25% for Mandrakeclub Silver Members and above. Press contact: Gaël Duval press at mandrakesoft dot com About Mandrakesoft Mandrakesoft is the publisher of the popular Mandrakelinux operating system, one of the most full-featured and easy to use Linux systems available. The company offers its enterprise, government and educational customers a complete range of GNU/Linux and Open Source software and related services. Mandrakesoft products are available in more than 120 countries through dedicated channels and also from Mandrakestore.com, the company's online store. Number 1 in several countries, Mandrakesoft has won many awards for quality and technical innovation. "Born on the Internet" in late 1998, Mandrakesoft has offices in the United States and France. Mandrakesoft is traded on Paris Euronext Marché Libre (ISIN Code: FR0004159382/MLMAN; Reuters code: MAKE.PA) and the US OTC market (stock symbol MDKFF). http://www.mandrakesoft.com
Posted May 5, 2004 20:01 UTC (Wed)
by mkc (guest, #2047)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted May 5, 2004 20:32 UTC (Wed)
by richardcownie (guest, #21397)
[Link]
In the case of AMD64 however, there is a big win from having The stuff I work on is many 100Klines of C++ with big data structures
Posted May 5, 2004 20:33 UTC (Wed)
by sbl (guest, #5131)
[Link]
More importantly, x86-64's larger register set -- twice the number of general purpose registers and SSE registers -- boosts performance in several ways: it reduces register spills and it enables a more efficient calling convention (some arguments are passed in registers, I don't know the details). See Kevin McGrath's talk here http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ for a credible explanation of this. I think x86-64 ABI also specifies that you can put temporary variables beyond the end of the stack, i.e., you don't need to update the stack pointer to allocate temporary variables -- the OS guarantees that interrupts skip a specified amount of stack space.
Posted May 5, 2004 21:30 UTC (Wed)
by emk (subscriber, #1128)
[Link]
In addition, the AMD64 architecture has a rather nice way of handling shared libraries, which are quite foul on x86 systems. In all honesty, the 64-bit registers are actually the least exciting thing about AMD64 for me. The architectural cleanups, though minor, take x86 technology to a whole new level. Happy geek joy!
Posted May 6, 2004 0:46 UTC (Thu)
by neoprene (guest, #8520)
[Link]
Posted May 6, 2004 1:16 UTC (Thu)
by gavino (guest, #16214)
[Link] (3 responses)
It corrupted my MBR by writing incorrect partition information, thereby making my Windows XP partition unbootable. I can't remember the exact details of the cause of the problem - something about different CHS reporting between 2.4 and 2.6 kernels perhaps, or just a mandrake developer assuming the wrong HDD access method. Whatever the cause, I had to zero out my MBR and recreate it with the Windows Recovery Console, at which point I removed Mandrake as well. I don't trust a distribution that can't even write to the MBR properly, so confidence is severely shaken. I'm keeping that part of my hard drive clean for Fedora Core 2 :) I'm going to backup my MBR before installing another OS that's for sure!
Posted May 6, 2004 6:46 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
Huh. What are you talking about ? Linux always had hard time with MBR. Understandable, in fact: you need to write in MBR something to satisfy BIOS and Linux does not use BIOS so it can have no clue as to what exactly will satisty BIOS! This is like take-off for flyer: take-off is very hard part of flight but it's also most irrelevant: there are a lot of flyers which can be nightmare to take-off but good in free fly and vice versa. I'm not advocating Mandrake (I'm not using it after all) but since "normal" modus of operandi for Windows is to totally destroy any possibility to boot Linux while installing Windows and you still are using Windows I can not see how Linux which did the same by mistake can be worse...
Posted May 6, 2004 22:43 UTC (Thu)
by gavino (guest, #16214)
[Link] (1 responses)
There are two differences here. One is that Mandrake Community Edition 10.0 screwed over the *partition information* section of the MBR, irrevocably damaging it as far as dual-booting is concerned. Some people had success in changing the BIOS from CHS to LBA but I and many others didn't. The only fix was to wipe the MBR clean and start afresh. Goodbye to my data in the Windows partition. The other difference is that Mandrake claim to support dual-booting. No other Linux distro I've ever installed has corrupted my MBR. This was a bug, not a feature, and a very nasty one. So nasty in fact that I doubt I'll ever use Mandrake again. A lot of people have been burnt by this. My back is now turned on Mandrake and their poor QA and I can't wait for FC2 :)
Posted May 8, 2004 4:05 UTC (Sat)
by robotralph (guest, #2570)
[Link]
Posted May 7, 2004 7:17 UTC (Fri)
by blietaer (guest, #19752)
[Link]
However, I was wondering: is Mandrake 10 the only one and/or pioneer in the 64 world?! Hopefully other will follow,right?
20% faster than what exactly? The same CPU in 32-bit mode? This sounds like a neat trick if true. Wouldn't you normally expect 64-bit software to be slightly slower than its 32-bit equivalent, all other things being equal?Why 20% faster?
You're correct that most architectures run slower in 64bit modeWhy 20% faster?
than 32bit mode - e.g. UltraSPARC - mostly because the data
is bloated by 64bit pointers and 8byte-alignment, leading to
more cache misses and memory bandwidth requirements.
extra general-purpose registers in 64bit mode. In 32bit mode
you have only 8 registers - use a few for stack pointer,
frame pointer, accumulator, temporaries for expression evaluation
and you probably have at most 3 registers available for register
variables. In 64bit mode there are 16 registers, allowing perhaps
as many as 10-12 register variables. And ever since the RISC
revolution of the mid-1980's, compilers have been terrifically
good at register allocation, so these extra registers really
have a big payoff.
and practically no floating point. Opteron is just great for this
kind of application.
There are obvious things that are faster, namely anything involving 64 bit arithmetic, which in 32 bit mode is done 32 bit at a time, unless coded using MMX or SSE.Why 20% faster?
As pointed out by the other posters, AMD64 has oodles of registers, which are about 4x faster than even AMD's fast L1 cache. And as far as I can tell, the x87 floating point stack is deprecated in favor of using SSE2 registers in scalar mode (a boon to compiler authors!).Registers & better shared libs?
...and for extra creamy goodness, the memory controller is built into the processor :) [akin to the Slot CPU of a few years ago had its L2 on a PCB next to the processor]. Why 20% faster?
Now we need compilers making faster code for the X86_64.
I'm too afraid to touch Mandrake now after the debacle that was Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition.Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 released
Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 released
Microsoft don't claim to support dual-booting of non-Windows operating systems, so I usually install Linux after Windows. If I have to install Windows after Linux and GRUB is in the MBR then that's not a problem - I anticipate this and have a rescue floppy or CD handy, and in no time at all I've got GRUB back in the MBR and everything is happily dual-booting. The fact is Windows hadn't screwed up the *partition information* of the MBR, it had merely changed the bootstrap part where GRUB resided and left the unknown partition types alone (unknown to Windows).Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 released
I noticed you specified that you used the comunity version of man 10. it was also said before you down loaded it it was not a finished product, more akin to a mid beta for testing. where final testing was done . did you submit a bugzilla report on the problem or just slink away.also you can receive broken code on a down load only takes one bit out of place, some mirrows are not up to the latest versions either so you may have received a slightly older version. they do change daily. at least till they get to producton versions, and they change some as well.
Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 released
Well we all had issues with Mandrake back in the 7.0 times, but I guess it is now quite a good, stable and user friendly distro.Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official for AMD64 released
Although I am not sur how to upgrade sarge or woody for 64...