MacPro Fedora Core 4 working!

[jamiedixon]

I realize there's improvements to be had but I wanted to announce some success in getting Fedora Core 4 working on the MacPro.

First, the terminal patch to run the mac in legacy 32 bit mode was necessary and worked fine:

sudo nvram boot-args="-legacy maxmem=2048"

Second, thanks to jdifronzo's post (http://forum.parallels.com/thread3659-2.html) suggesting a problem with ethernet packets larger than 1500, setting the read and write buffer size in the /etc/fstab file to 1024 solved my networking problems. Granted "scp" still won't work as it doesn't look at that but nfs seems to be fine.

stor16:/pic16 /pic16 nfs tcp, rw, intr, bg, hard, timeo=20, rsize=1024,wsize=1024 0 0

I've yet to do thorough benchmarking compared to the other machines I have here but am thrilled to get this far!

I guess I need to send in my $79.95!

Thanks, parallels team! I'm looking forward to getting access to all 4 cores and improved hardware (graphics in particular) support, in addition to cracking this packet size problem.

 

[jamiedixon]

Real world benchmark

Unfortunately, upon inititial inspection, Fedora Core 4 on my 4x2.66 MacPro looks like it's only running about 42% as fast as a 2x242 Opteron. 85 sec / frame MacPro vs. 35 sec Opteron.

This observation was made averaging 100 frames of generic image compositing tasks which access local disks, network and heavily process, etc.

We haven't tracked down the bottlenecks yet... disk? processing? network? We'll see.

 

[palter]

Is the application able to take advantage of multiple processors and multiple cores? Remember that Parallels only virtualizes a single core on a single processor.

 

[jamiedixon]

apples to apples (penguins?)

Actually I'm only using one of the 2 opterons for this particular task anyway, so unfortunately it is kind of an apples to apples (penguins?) test.