Supermicro 6023P-8R and FreeBSD: it works!

[David Raistrick]

Folks,

Here's a brief rundown regarding 4.8-R on the Supermicro X5DP8-G2
motherboard.  Dual 2.4 533FSB Xeons and Kingston ValueRAM memory, and
Seagate U320 disks.

First, I ran into problems with my memory and motherboard...these problems
were fixed after RMAing the board to supermicro.  My curse strikes again.
:)

Firmware on my Seagate disks needed to be updated to 0006.  Supermicro
provided the firmware, a list member provided source for a
freebsd-operable firmware update program.
Some information is
available here: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/u320_firmware.html



As a uniprocessor board, the system had no issues with a GENERIC kernel.


Enabling SMP WITHOUT Hyperthreading enabled in the kernel or Bios resulted
in errors and hangs along these lines:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Dump Card State Begins <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
ahd0: Dumping Card State at program address 0x10f Mode 0x33
Card was paused



WITH hyperthreading enabled in the kernel or bios, the system worked
perfectly, completely stable so far.   A list member suggested that the
no-HTT problem is because the boards BIOS leaves the local APIC on the
logical CPUs enabled, which breaks the way FreeBSD handles things.  He
provided a patch for 4.8-R that always enables HTT, but disables the local
processors, similar to the way this is handled in 5.x.


With this patch in place the system has 2 CPUs (0,2) and is 100% stable so
far.


I'd like to see Supermicro address the APCI issue, but outside of that
they've been very helpful both before and after the sale.  (I ask a lot of
questions...:)  I'm now 100% happy with this system, and motherboard.


Thanks to everyone for your help getting this guy going.  I've only been
running it for a few days now, but so far no other quirks that I've found.
I've not used the 1000Base interfaces yet, but since they're a recent
intel chip, I'm sure they'll be fine.  At 100Base they seem fine, at
least. :)

I'd recommend this motherboard, and/or chassis.

...david

---
david raistrick
drais at atlasta.net		http://www.expita.com/nomime.html