Your SGI system comes with a base Linux distribution SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 1 (SLES 11 SP1) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6) and SGI Performance Suite 1.2 software preinstalled.
Installation instructions for SGI Performance Suite 1.2 software are contained in the product release notes in a file with the product name and -readme.txt appended to it that is available in /docs directory on the CD media. For example, for the SGI Accelerate 1.2 product this file is SGI-Accelerate-1.2-readme.txt.
When doing a network installation on a system with multiple Ethernet interfaces, there is no guarantee about initial interface names. The first interface discovered will be named "eth0", and so on. This can make network installations confusing. If this is a problem, a workaround is to remove the Ethernet cards that are not being used to install software over the network. Once the installation is complete, the Ethernet cards can be reinstalled. A persistent naming mechanism ensures that an interface, once named, retains its name across system reboots.
You cannot access XVM Volumes in Rescue Mode. It is possible to boot into rescue mode from the operating system DVD, but that DVD does not contain the xvm kernel module. This makes it impossible to perform maintenance on XVM volumes from rescue mode at this time. SGI recommends that you do not migrate any system directories to XVM since there is no way to access them from rescue mode.
You need to add xfs_quota to the INITRD_MODULES variable in the /etc/sysconfig/kernel file when rootflags=quota is set or the initrd boot loader will panic your system at boot time. This technique is SLES specific.
For x86_64 systems, SLES 11 SP1 contains kernel-default and kernel-xen. The kernel-default variant provides multi-processor support.
For x86_64 systems, RHEL 6 has one kernel image, kernel and kvm is the only supported virtualization.
For information on the latest firmware for your SGI system, see the SGI Foundation Software 2.4 Start Here available at http://docs.sgi.com .
 | Important: Please backup your license key files prior to installing SLES11 SP1, RHEL 6, and/or SGI Performance Suite 1.2 software. A license key file is not included in these RPMs. |
Your original license key files will need to be restored after you complete your installation.
In terms of software licensing support, the operating system distributors do not ship any licensing code. Independent software vendors (ISVs) are responsible for obtaining and including software licensing components into their products. SGI products ship with SGI licensing software.
For information on the SGI software licensing mechanism called LK , see the SGI Foundation Software 2.4 Start Here available at http://docs.sgi.com .