Linux & Virtualization on Altix

[Rigler, Stephen C.]

On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 09:01 -0400, Jason Dixon wrote:
> We recently picked up a new SGI Altix 350 (2 bricks, 4 cpus, 4GB) for  
> "playing around", although it will hopefully become a part of our  
> corporate development environment.  It came installed with SuSE 9  
> SLES (which I'm not very fond of) and some Red Hat Enterprise for  
> Itanium CDs, which I'd like to install in it.

How are the RedHat CD's labeled?  We have 3 Altix machines running
ProPack 3 (which is based on RHEL 3).  Apparently yours would be running
ProPack 4 since they've decided to shift to SuSE.  I'm curious if they
provided you with ProPack 3 CD's but pre-installed the PP4 OS on the
machine.

>   I'd like to do some  
> sort of virtualization, a la Xen, to allocate virtual systems to  
> various developers, but I'm not finding much that will run on the  
> Altix 350 in 32-bit mode with SMP, much less ia64.
> 
> Has anyone run Xen on *any* flavor of Linux running on Altix (in  
> particular, Red Hat/Fedora-based)?  Any suggestions or ideas?
> 
> -J.

Just glancing at the docs for Xen, it looks pretty x86-specific
(especially considering the mention of them working on a "port" to
x86-64).  There isn't really a "32-bit mode" on Itanium.  You can run
32-bit binaries, but the CPU's emulate the 32-bit instructions.  We've
safely run some code, but it's always preferable to go with a pure 64-
bit solution.

-Steve