2.6 Kernel (NUMA) and Fedora Development

[Wayne Frazee]

Good evening.

I have a few questions this evening for the Fedora test list. If they have been asked before then I could not find them, please show forgiveness and do not throw random nasty objects at me....

1) Has anyone had the opportunity to do some rough benchmarking of FC2-T1 (or any linux flavor with 2.6 integration) on 8+ processor systems with NUMA extensions in use?  Is there any real apples-to-apples comparison to draw it up against?  If so, what sort of platform would be the best comparison?  I understand that the test 1 platform is still quite early and that the technology is certainly to be optimized in the process of maturation in the course of future kernel version but some early numbers would be nice.

2) Thanks to some of my consulting work that I do on the side, I recently had the opportunity to do some work and testing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a variety of hardware configurations.  To my surprise, when attempting to load RHEL WS 2.1 (update 3) onto a legacy notebook computer, I was presented with a message from anaconda that the i586 architechture was no longer support and that RHEL WS required i686.  Will fedora continue to support legacy architectures?  If so, will the support of legacy architectures retard development with "cutting edge" technologies, one of the core goals of the project, as I understand it?

3) This is perhaps more along the lines of a feature request but I wanted to solicit community or developer feedback with regard to implementing a "fuller" GUI NTP interface.  Currently, FC1 includes support for a single time source for time synchronization.  Despite the fact that the redhat clock is a stratus 1 source, large-scale distribution of the Fedora and RHEL operating systems with time sync against the redhat machine is sure to put additional strain on the RedHat source.  Is there a future possibility of a interface where administrative users may have more flexibility over time source selection?  Some options such as the ability to use either a dynamic or pre-defined array of time sources on a certain stratus would certainly be appreciated.  (E.g. specify stratus 2 sources, the app would then consider the time zone of choice and/or location and configure the NTP list with the closets open access sources.)

Thanks for any response the community may be able to provide.

Wayne S. Frazee
(#Fedora user: wfrazee)

"It was once said that if you give a million monkeys with keyboards a million years they would eventually write all the works of Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to USENET, we know thats not true."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/attachments/20040221/f58c88e3/attachment.htm>