There have been significant problems reported with the Nvidia chipset on the AMD/Opteron boards primarily around the "forcedeth" kernel module.

We have had reports of generally 2 failures:

Perceus initramfs network failure/IRQ timeout (tested and observed on multiple Sun X2200 systems). On the X2200, the work around is to use Perceus >= 1.3.0 and disable all on-board Nvidia network controllers in the BIOS.

Perceus initramfs works, but booted VNFS image has no network. With some drivers you may notice that the MAC address is also in reverse order. We think this todo with the forcedeth kernel module not unloading and de-initializing the hardware properly (but that is just a guess). This was observed on a Supermicro AMD/Nvidia motherboard. Nvidia has a demo cluster at the time of this writing, and an open ticket (#327111) referencing this driver issue.

We recommend caution and emphasize working with one of our partnered vendors (that test and build working solutions) when investing in an Opteron/Nvidia solution.