Would this system work correctly with FreeBSD 5.3 ?

[Scott Long]

Steve Kargl wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 11:29:01PM +0000, Hugo Silva wrote:
> 
>>I'm buying a Quad AMD Opteron 64 bits, with 4GB memory. I'd like to know 
>>if FreeBSD 5.3 will support a quad-cpu system (with HTT, 8) correctly, 
>>without performance losses and consistent operation, no crashes etc. Is 
>>the 4GB memory still a problem in amd64 ?
> 
> 
> You're asking a possibly bad question.
> 
> First, FreeBSD 5.3 will run on a quad opteron system.  The tyan
> quad motherboard supports upto 32 GB on memory, and FreeBSD 5.3
> should/will use all 32 GB.  So, your 4 GB is no problem.
> 

4GB+ is a problem on 5.3-RELEASE due to DMA issues.  Only a small
handful of storage drivers will actually work.

> Second, HTT may or may not cause a small impact on performance.
> It depends on what applications you run.  Of course, my opteron
> processes don't support HTT
> 

Of course there is no such a thing as an HTT Opteron system.  In any 
case, there have been fixes recently that help with a potential lockup 
on systems with lots of CPU's.  It's not yet ideal, but even more fixes
are in the pipeline.


Scott