FreeBSD-AMD64 on Xeon MP - SOLVED

[Eirik Øverby]

Hi all,

the issue below has been solved by a new BIOS for the server in  
question. I recently received a beta BIOS from Supermicro, after  
having reported the issue and done a bit of troubleshooting with them.  
The tip that helped the most was the boot-linux-first trick.

Anyone who wants the BIOS may mail me privately; otherwise it'll  
likely be released by Supermicro in the not-too-distant future.

/Eirik

On Oct 20, 2008, at 08:22, Eirik Øverby wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > I try to run FreeBSD-7-AMD64 on a Quad Xeon (Xeon MP 7320) and  
>> 32GB RAM.
>> > The Board is a X7QC3 by supermicro and the installation is done on
>> > another system, updated and plugged to this system. So I have a  
>> drive
>> > with 7-STABLE compiled today.
>> >
>> > The last line I see from dmesg is vga0- then the system freezes.
>> >
>> > Anyone using a similar configuration or knows what could be  
>> wrong? I
>> > still have some days left to play with it, before this box gets  
>> shipped
>> > to the customer.
>>
>> This looks very, very similar to what I had once, on similar hardware
>> (4x Xeon 7xxx, SuperMicro). I didn't find a solution and didn't  
>> bother
>> since the box isn't intended for FreeBSD. I did find (by accident) a
>> curious workaround: I booted Linux (I used Ubuntu 8.04 amd64 LiveCD -
>> just to boot it, without installing), then rebooted and booted  
>> FreeBSD -
>> worked every time, but it's obviously not a long-term solution. If  
>> you
>> can also verify that this "solves" the problem, then someone might  
>> work
>> with you to produce a patch.
>
> I just received four such servers, all intended for FreeBSD.... And  
> I'm seeing exactly the same problem. I'm going to try booting Linux  
> and then back into FreeBSD, but it's obviously not a solution.  
> Anyone who might want to work on this can have a box like this to  
> work on via remote KVM (including remote boot media capability) any  
> time.
>
> I'm going to go poke the supplier and Supermicro for some updated  
> firmware.
> Any progress on your end?
>
> Some additional info: Safe mode boot gets a bit further, to the  
> point where it tries to mount/read from /dev/md0, but then hangs hard.
>
> /Eirik
>