Windows 10 installation is straightforward most of the time, but not intuitive on Servers. For starters, first check whether the motherboard can support Windows 10. Brute forcing an uncertified Operating System installation can lead to incompatability issues. For Windows, most notably, the infamous BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).
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On a fresh Windows 10 install from ISO (not triggered from a Win7 upgrade or restored with whatever Boot Media comes with your original system), there are no drivers installed. Since there are no drivers installed, that means the network ports will not work natively, and that you cannot have Windows 10 search online and auto-update to fill in the drivers needed for installed hardware.
With Windows, It cannot fully detect installed hardware from a fresh installation, so I have to yet again plug a USB into another computer- this time to load drivers onto itYou will need to plug in a USB to a computer that can download the drive files, load those driver files onto the USB drive, and then plug that USB to spoonfeed this Windows 10 Prodrive back into this newly installed Windows 10 system to install the drivers.
Windows 10 drivers are limited on servers, and heavily varies from manufacturer to manufacturer on their respective resource page from their websites.
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- Visit your system motherboard website's driver page
- Filter the drivers for Windows 10
- Locate and download chipset drivers (if there are no chipset drivers available, just skip to network/LAN drivers)
- Locate and download network/LAN drivers
- Load both drivers' .zip files onto USB drive, then unpack them
- Plug USB into your Win10 Pro system, first install Chipset drivers using the 'application' file
- Restart system
- Install Network drivers using the 'application' file
- Once network drivers are installed, connect to a network
- Scan for Windows Update, reboot system after every completed batch of updates; repeat if necessary until Win10 system is up-to-date
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- My system is an Exxact <whatever nomenclature at the time> that uses a Supermicro SYS-7049GP-TRT. Supermicro's website is here, and I click on their Drivers & Utilities link below the system image.
Filter and download drivers for chipset and LAN for Windows 10, then download both
Expand title 7049GP-TRT Chipset Drivers Unpack both zip files onto a USB drive
Expand title Extracting zip files to USB drive WinRAR is free to download, in case you do not have a package utility in Windows.
Personal choice, but I deleted the .zip files, since it is not needed after extracting them.
Plug USB drive containing the Drivers onto the newly installed Win10 Pro system, install Chipset drivers first if you have it (if not, skip to network/LAN drivers in step 6)
Expand title Installing Chipset drivers - Reboot system when it asks after the Chipset driver installation - VERY IMPORTANT TO DO BEFORE INSTALLING NETWORK DRIVERS
Install Network drivers
Expand title Installing Network drivers Check for Windows Updates, reboot as necessary
Expand title Checking for Windows Updates
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BIOS Onboard - Single display - Onboard VGA
BIOS Onboard - Dual display - Onboard VGA and Graphics Card
GPU Burn-in with Onboard/Offboard video display channels
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Benefit of Linux, right after fresh installation, is that the onboard network ports are highly likely of already being detected, and are already work if I enabled them through Linux OS installer, or even in the settings without updating the OS at all. I could also query the installed hardware without drivers.
- Taking this into account, Windows having drivers is adding another point of failure for each piece of hardware that relies on them
- Exxact doesn't make Windows, nor Linux. Exxact assembles HPC's and servers using various hardware components, and then apply Operating System installations towards HPC/servers
- Why Linux is used in >90% of supercomputer
- "Supercomputers seek to maximize performance. Usually supercomputers are assigned with jobs that require computation at a very high speed. When compared to Windows, Windows has number of extraneous processes that are unnecessary and only degrade the supercomputer performance However as Windows is proprietary the code cannot be altered to cut off unnecessary processes. With Linux it is certainly possible which gives a performance boost to computers."