since we have difficulty to find suitable machines/motherboards with 5PCIs on the market we tryied to get any older system. Actualy I am about to buy few Dell Precission workstations equipped by dual PIII/800Mhz. AFAIK there is no multiple CPU support in the 2.9.x ROS, and multiple CPU support is gonna be in the RouterOS 3x. I cant simply remove secondary CPU because unit requires some kind of fake processor card which I dont have; units doesnt work with only one CPU and as I have physically tested it doesnt work correctly with ROS 2.9x either when both CPUs are seated.
The question is:
Would you guys recommend me to buy this dualCPU machines and wait for ROS 3x (I have read somewhere in this forum there should be non beta public release within spring 07 so it could come really soon) or keep trying to get another suitable PCs?
Im interested in PIII usage because
they does have 5PCI slots to fit all my wirelles cards in (ap24GHz, ap5GHz three another directional connection is my standard configuration)
they does have lesser power consumption compared to P4
they are powerfull enough for me and twice cheaper than P4
Im still unable to get P4 with 5PCIs today in the market
thanks for reading this looong silly text and for any suggestions .
You can still run a Dual-CPU system with 2.9.x.. The term “Unsupported” mean that ROS can’t use the second CPU but runs as a single-cpu system. Also the PIII choise is good because the performance of ROS is merely an issue of clock freq than how much memory it can address.. So a 1GHz P3 system perform as well as a 1GHz P4 system with RouterOS..
Im using as many PCIs as I can because Im trying to minimize radio crosstalk between radio cards, and R14 is not the best solution to get rid of radio crosstalk, Im affraid.
I just wondering if you have been running ROS2.9.x on dual PIII machine.
I had posted to this forum regard dual PIII because It keeps displaying 100% cpu load with ROS2.9x , randomly hangs up and randomly slows down (when I disable secondary CPU in the bios neither), however ROS3.0beta7 recognises dual CPUs correctly and works smoothly.
Perhaps Im mistaken if there is some problem with machine itself, but linux stress and memory tests says that unit is OK so far.
I have been running ROS on Dual PIII boards, as well as other dual cpu boards.. When i am having problems it usually comes down to NIC problems or RAM.. One thing you should keep in mind with the RB14 is also that you will have several cards sharing one IRQ and that will always slow down performance..
Thank you guys for helping again.
I’ve doublechecked all my config and I have found the problem. It was at my side (as allways).
I had used wrong install medium for ROS2.9. With last version It works smoothly, so I definitely decided to buy 5 units.
So here is the conclusion:
Dell precision workstation 220 with dual CPU definitely works fine with ANY version of ROS, there is no problem with ROS2.9.x or ROS3.0 neither.
to Denny: I woud like to use that boards ( we currently run arround 60 MTik based devices) but I have really serious dificulty to get any 5-6PCI slot board or machine on today’s market.
Our backbone system runs on two PCs like that -2.4GHz P4 /6PCI slots fully loaded.
to JR: thanks for remind me that topic, I have had read that in the past (more than twice, because that really interested me).
Thank you all for sharing expiriences and for focusing your mind to try help with problem of others.
