argus on AMD Opteron?

[Peter Van Epp]

	I've run argus on Athelon's and Linux 7.3. The channel bonding code
binding two Sysconnect Gig cards in to a single interface seems to work fine.
I haven't managed to pry either of the Opteron systems we have out of our 
cluster maintainers cold dead fingers yet to see if that works better (nor
have I gotten him to load up a gig link to see what happens except in short
tests so far :-).
	Given Carter's comments on the speed increase of PowerPC because of 
the endian issue I'm poking at our Xserve boxes from Apple (currently in the 
same set of fingers as the Opteron) as an option assuming I can get a 
Sysconnect card and drivers in to it under OS 10. I believe that is 1U as well 
and available with dual G5s although whether this is a suitable option for you
may depend if you have Mac fanatics around as well (my desktop machine and 
around %30 of the rest of campus here is Mac so it isn't an issue here :-)).
	I've discovered that bpf on Linux is more difficult to increase the 
buffer size of than FreeBSD (careful butchery of the source and a recompile 
looks to be needed), but sadly FreeBSD seems to disagree with the Athelons 
(its a dual processor) and I expect that may cause problems at the higher 
speeds if not done something about. I did see instructions on boosting Linux 
kernel buffers on the tcpreply page on sourceforge though (something else 
worth doing at high volumes). My sense from top (some time ago, so things may 
have changed) is that FreeBSD is more efficient than Linux (at a Gig, Linux7.3 
was using pretty much 1 full CPU of the dual, and FreeBSD on a single CPU was 
only taking about %40 for the same load, but as noted won't or wouldn't then 
run stably with a dual processor).
	I'd be somewhat concerned about the impact of Mach message passing on
capture performance on MacOS, but if Carter has seen a performance increase
on PowerPC perhaps that fear is groundless. In any case food for thought :-).

Peter Van Epp / Operations and Technical Support 
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada

On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 09:19:37AM -0800, Mike Iglesias wrote:
> Has anyone run argus on an AMD Opteron-based system running Linux?  Any
> problems?
> 
> I need to upgrade my argus system and I'm looking at the various options
> available in a rackmount 1u system.  We've been buying systems from
> Appro (http://www.appro.com) for mail/pop/imap/misc servers, so I'm
> looking at what they have available (Xeon and Opteron based).
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mike Iglesias                          Email:       iglesias at draco.acs.uci.edu
> University of California, Irvine       phone:       949-824-6926
> Network & Academic Computing Services  FAX:         949-824-2069