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.
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