FreeBSD 9-Stable + Atom D510 Freeze

[Gary Palmer]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 09:12:09AM -0400, Thomas Laus wrote:
> > Tom,
> > I have had multiple D510's and now D525's that are part of my test
> > systems, all are 4GB machines and all run the latest (ie 2 days old) 9.X
> > Stable.  They're faultless.  I have a D510 in production serving 30
> > users - yes its a 1G system running, sendmail, squid, samba as PDC. 
> > It's been in place for at least 7 months and runs without any hiccups.
> > 
> > Though I would point out that the Atom processor does NOT do out of
> > order processing, so a VIA motherboard that is of lower GHz builds
> > worlds/ports in less time that a supposedly faster Atom. 
> > 
> > Your question re HT, yes HT introduces some additional latency, but is
> > unlikely to be the problem.
> >
> Thanks for the information about the HT CPU's.  I asked the question to the 
> group because I did not know if they were functionally any different than a 
> traditional CPU.  I successfully built my problem port, Tshark, yesterday 
> while monitoring 'top' on another console.  I observed that all 4 cpu's were 
> in service for the build and at times were running at 100 percent each.  The 
> State column on all 4 occasionally showed a 'pfault' on all 4 but recovered 
> and the build continued to successful completion.
>  
> > When I experience something like spurious reboots and it is definately
> > not hardware, then I delete /usr/src and /usr/ports and perform a
> > complete rebuild.  (Yes seriously, and on the Atom's we're talking days,
> > aren't we :)  )
> >
> I have been using this Atom D510 since it was released about 3 years ago.  It 
> ran on FreeBSD 8-Stable until about a month ago.  I installed an Intel 520 
> SSD and loaded a fresh copy of a FreeBSD 9 Snapshot.  After getting the 
> source and ports tarballs, I used svnup to bring both up to date.  I built 
> and installed world and the kernel to bring me up to Stable.  I rebuilt all 
> of my ports using Portmaster.
> 
> The spurious reboot issue existed for the last 3 years when running FreeBSD-8 
> Stable.  I never had the problem building world or kernel.  It only occurred 
> when building some ports.  Subversion and Tshark more often than others.  
> FreeBSD 9-Stable was frozen when I tried to build tshark, but I was able to 
> build it OK yesterday.  Everything hardware related other than the Atom 
> microprocessor and the Intel motherboard itself is new.  The OS is now a 
> different version and all of the source was rebuilt monthly.  The ports have 
> been been built many times in the last 3 years.

When building kernel & world do you use the '-j' argument to do parallel
builds?  AFAIK thats not done by default, but it is for some ports.

Gary