CPU upgrade vs CPUTYPE

[Joseph A. Nagy, Jr]

Cross-posting reply to amd64@ for relevance and to get answers from 
those smart gents.

On 12/18/12 23:17, Toomas Aas wrote:
> Hello!
>
> We have a small server running FreeBSD 8.3 amd64 with Intel Pentium D
> 945 CPU. As the motherboard/CPU combo is getting rather old, we are
> considering an upgrade to new motherboard with Xeon E3-1230 CPU. We
> currently have these CPU settings
>
> in /etc/make.conf:
> CPUTYPE?=nocona
>
> in kernel configuration:
> cpu HAMMER

this is the only possible setting in the kernel conf for amd64 as I was 
told.

This was why (and might answer the make.conf question as well:

from b.f.:
> Leave it alone.  The choices for the cpu directive in the kernel
> config file, as described in config(5) and listed in
> src/sys/conf/options.<arch> (the only choice for amd64 is HAMMER),
> have nothing to do with the choices available for the CPUTYPE variable
> (which you may want to change to suit your hardware -- these are the
> architecture-dependent options available for the -march and -mtune
> directives of your compiler that are also recognized by bsd.cpu.mk),
> or with the cpu descriptions printed during boot.

As for the rest of your questions, I leave them in the hands of those 
more knowledgeable than I. HTH

> Almost all the software is built from ports, few bits compiled directly
> from source. Base system is maintained by buildworld.
>
> Can we expect the software compiled with above CPU settings to run
> without problems on the Xeon E3? We had a chance recently to try a
> temporary motherboard/CPU swap in this server, replacing the CPU with
> Core i3-2xxx and there were some 'signal 11' errors, but I'm not sure
> whether this was due to incompatible CPUTYPE or something else.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>


-- 
Yours in Christ,

Joseph A Nagy Jr
"Whoever loves instruction loves knowledge, But he who hates correction
is stupid." -- Proverbs 12:1
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