FreeBSD 5.4 or 6.0 as postgresql-server

[Claus Guttesen]

Hi.

I just installed FreeBSD 5.4 on a Tyan K8QS. It has two dual-core
opteron 870's, 8 GB RAM, amr-raid using two drives in raid-1 and two
bge onboard-nic's. I had problems recompiling kernel and world until I
added hw.physmem=4GB to /boot/loader.conf.

So I tried FreeBSD 6.0 to see if the problem went away. Same thing, so
I added hw.physmem=3GB (again) and recompiled the kernel, this time
omitting all ata-related code.

After removing hw.physmem from loader.conf and rebooting the ata-free
kernel world and kernel compiles without problems. Omitting ata isn't
a big deal since the only ata-device is the dvd-drive.

Since 6.0 just came out the door it may be premature to ask whether I
should go for RELENG_6_0 or 5.4 (RELENG_5). The server will only be
doing postgresql 7.4.9. Is anyone running postgresql with 8 GB RAM or
more on 6.0?

Our current (and slightly smaller hardware-wise) db-server is running
RELENG_5_4 but I'd like to get the improved smp-, disk- and
network-related improvements in 6.0.

regards
Claus