From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <134a1c844a8343c74b1e3bb833af00c6@plan9.bell-labs.com>
From: jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] small boxed PC and dual CPU file server?
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 11:16:50 -0400
Topicbox-Message-UUID: d217fcdc-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

On Fri Jul 19 04:08:39 EDT 2002, okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp wrote:
> I saw some very charming PCs today, those are named as KCF-S868
> or KCF-S767 barebone system, the former of which is for Pen 4 and
> the latter for AMD (~1.1GHz).   The chipset is VIA/P4M266 and SIS 740,
> respectively.   The most atrractive point to me is their box size, very
> small and massive, 215(W)x310(D)x200(H).  They can have a HDD,
> aCD/DVD-ROM and a floppy with integrated nic chip.   They have also 
> one PCI and AGP(P4 version) slots.
> 
> I'd like to use one of them for our file server with Tekram scsi card
> and external scsi drives.   Does Pen 4 can run file server?
> 
> Another one, is there any advantage to use dual Pentium system for
> file server?
> 
> Kenji

Yes, Plan 9 will work with the P4 (if you have a chip faster than 2.2GHz
make sure you have the current updates installed or the chip speed will be
incorrectly determined and weird things happen).

I believe there are hardware issues with the P4 and TLB flushing in SMP
mode we'd have to put fixes in for, but we don't have such a system to try
it out on.

The current filesystem code makes makes no use of extra CPUs on Intel
platforms. However, the new filesystem stuff we are working on will.

--jim