After a few rounds of updates from Fedora 10 and RPM Fusion repositories, I would say this latest-and-greatest is shaping up very nicely and in a very short amount time. It has been 10-months since I built my power workstation using Fedora 8, so a lot of software has been churned out since then. The workstation also runs Microsoft’s Ultimate Vista 64 without any issue and really showcases its performance well, but I cannot say the same for any Linux desktop version.
The crux of its perceived performance loss is evident in the lack of a properly accelerated 3D graphic driver for its ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 GPUs. Oddly, ATI released its first “same-day” Linux driver coupled with its new product, 4870 X2, just a few months after I bought the earlier version of this consolidated Crossfire GPU set. On top of that snub, ATI later released Linux driver support for the 3870 chipset, but not the x2. Did I buy an Edsel? What’s the underlying issue for singling this card out?
Fortunately for me, the open-source versions have been humming along with regular updates and providing solid 2D performance. The latest release supports XRandR, so fullscreen resolution switches are now seamless. SDL apps are running without issue now, and I noticed that DRI mode is enabled and allows for most OpenGL apps to launch, just not hardware-accelerated. But this gives hope that real progress is being made… I just hope it is not false hope.
It was also cool to see this bug submitted back in March get fixed… and the cool CPU gadget in Vista still only shows a maximum 4-cores, even though the system detects all eight. All I need now is a nice decal of an eightball to put on my big Lian-Li black aluminium case. But why so many cores?
Virtual machine technology at the commodity hardware level is converging and replacing the (formerly known as) enterprise-class servers. The denser and cheaper you can deliver memory, cpu and i/o bandwidth, the easier it becomes to manage more virtual machine environments within the physical limitations: power, cooling, and space. Of course, I do not have such requirements as an individual, but it allows me to explore and learn more about the software technologies to configure and deploy virtual machines. And shown here is enough justification: I like compiling my arcade emulators fast, as demonstrated:
$ time make -j9 PTR64=0
real 0m23.513s
user 1m35.602s
sys 0m42.325s
$ ll -h mame
-rwxrwxr-x 1 rhurst rhurst 37M 2008-12-27 10:26 mame
