Any Update on HP Workstation Support? XW9300

[Jeff Isaac]

Bob Johnson wrote:
> On 11/27/07, Jeff Isaac <cineveggie.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Greetings All!
>>
>> I am new to this list (normally hanging out on Freebsd-PPC) and have
>> a question regarding some possible hardware support changes in
>> FreeBSD 7. I was wondering whether support has been added for the HP
>> XW9300 Professional Workstation. 6 would not boot with the problems
>> described here:
>>
>> http://bsd.haofood.net/2006/02/02/freebsd-on-hp-xw/
>>
>>     
>
> I have an HP dc7700 that gives the "no smap" error when trying to boot
> 7.0-BETA2-amd64, but boots fine with 7.0-BETA3-i386. So your problem
> MIGHT be solved for i386, but probably not solved for amd64. I haven't
> tried BETA3-amd64 (assuming it exists), but I've seen no suggestion
> that this was fixed between betas.
>
> There is a PR that is related:
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=111955
>
> - Bob
>
>   

Hi Bob!

Thanks for getting back to me with this link. These HP systems seem to 
be tricky for BSD kernels for whatever reason. Is there any way to 
gently "encourage" this issue to become more important for a potential 
fix? I know that things like this can be difficult to nail down 
especially on a programmer's limited and largely unpaid time, but I 
would be willing to make a small (I am a college student after all) 
financial contribution to seeing this issue at least more deeply 
investigated. Short of that is there any Linux distro you could 
recommend that behaves similarly to FreeBSD in terms of usability since 
several BSD's seem to have this trouble? Is it worth bugging HP? I see 
that though the i386 port seems to have fixed this, it appears that it 
suffers from random panics on our families of machines.

Thanks so much for your time and assistance. If I do end up getting 
another of these machines, I will be more than happy to help in whatever 
way I can to get them information off of it if the folks working on the 
port can only tell me how. I'm no CS grad but I do have experience in 
IT, so hopefully I can find what they'd be looking for :-)

Thanks again!

- Jeff