[realtek] Realtek 8139c - Beowulf

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Riordan, Ben wrote:

> 	David, my 14 year old son, and I are building a Beowulf.  David
...
> 	The nodes 1 to 4 are 1ghz AMD processors on an KVE7 motherboard with
> a Realtek 8139c network interface card.  We ordered the nodes without cd
> drives only floppy drives as we anticipated using NFS to clone the nodes.

The Scyld system doesn't use NFS.  NFS doesn't scale well, and has
bottleneck performance issues for clusters.  Instead we use a single
system image model with a remote execution system.  The default mode is
diskless, while still fully supporting local disks.

You can get the unsupported basic version of Scyld Beowulf from Linux
Central for just a few dollars.  You should be able to configure a
working cluster in about five minutes more than the time it takes to
load a single machine.

> We are having a devil of a time compiling the source code and installing the
> drivers.  We are using a netboot strategy to start the process, however our
> 8139.o is not loading.

Make certain the driver that you are using will recognize the specific
PCI vendor ID on the cards.


Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993