I’m currently building a “new” system with dual Xeons (E5-2643’s) on a Lenovo workstation motherboard. What I’m planning to do is run Linux (probably Mint 19) as the host OS with it’s own GPU and setup Windows 10 in a KVM with PCIe passthrough to another GPU for gaming.
My main question here though is; what is the likelihood of compatibility with the motherboard I’m planning to use, which is not ‘common mainstream hardware’? Is it possible there will be audio driver or network adaptor issues, for example?
I’m aware much of the internet runs on servers running Linux, but those are not running mainstream desktop distros, if you know what I mean. Just curious if anyone here has experience with running Linux on dual-CPU workstations.
Generally, I would say yes. But to be sure it is always good to just check for your specific hardware. Then you don’t have to guess, but instead know for sure. Find out the chipsets of your hardware, search if they are compatible and then you are on the safe side.
I’m definitely going to search the chipsets and see if they’re compatible. But I was just curious if others are running similar systems and if there were any issues they ran into.
Last time I had compatability issues of this type was 2010. Nowadays Linux is pretty solid and can support most hardware, even the type of hardware you have. So from my personal experience, I would say you’re good to go. To be honest, if I were you, I would just start installing the OS, assuming it should work fine.
In the mid 1990s through to mid 2000s - I nearly always ran SMP systems… Always Linux or Windows NT (not Win 95/98/ME)… pretty sure SMP has been part of Linux since “forever”?
Never had an issue where Linux didn’t recognize a machine with 2 physical CPU’s…
Had (still got it somewhere) an Asus Slot II motherboard - Pentium II 266 - dual booting NT4 and Slackware Linux - replaced the 266 with a pair of Celeron 466’s and it all just “worked”… I think I had to tweak Windows NT to go SMP, but not Linux.
Last machine I did physical SMP on for “home use” was a Dual Opteron with 2 x Opteron 64 (single core each) - IBM “A-Series” : it just worked as SMP without any issues…
While at Intel for 2 decades, I worked on performance design & improvement of software running on single, dual and 4-socket Xeon platforms (usually in regard to large server farms). Linux was the OS of choice for most of the customer and academic computer centers and many of the in-house machines. Linux was chosen for reasons of compatibility with the hardware, readily available open-source drivers, very good multi-processor job scheduling, power control, low overhead and a standards-driven API. We have used motherboards from ASUS, Intel (contract manufactured), SuperMicro, Fa****ok, MSI, and others. We - of course - had publicly-released AMD server motherboards for comparative benchmarking - also (in our department) usually running Linux. Linux, itself, was almost never any problem on these dual or quad machines.
You should be fine, but always best to research the hardware for the particular distro you are interested in to be sure. However, you also need to remember LINUX distros tend to run a little behind the most current technology. This is because they need time to come out with all the hardware drivers, etc. This is the nature of Open Source.
