freebsd stable - Nov 2006 - 6.1 with PAE on a recent server (HP DL380 G5 or Dell PE 1950) ?

Hello,

I will soon get some new servers with more than 4 GB of RAM, and
I am wondering if they will work fine even with the PAE
option activated: are all the required drivers (RAID mfid, bce
on the Dell, ciss0 on the HP) 100% compatible, or should I expect
trouble? 

If you have a working "/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/xxxx" with active
PAE on one of these servers, I'd be interested :)

Btw, when will we see these new servers listed under:
http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html ? 
Or should I use send-pr ? :)

Thanks & regards,
Olivier

Olivier Mueller wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I will soon get some new servers with more than 4 GB of RAM, and
> I am wondering if they will work fine even with the PAE
> option activated: are all the required drivers (RAID mfid, bce
> on the Dell, ciss0 on the HP) 100% compatible, or should I expect
> trouble? 
>   
Why not use AMD64 mode instead of PAE?

On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 07:30:09PM +0100, Olivier Mueller
wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I will soon get some new servers with more than 4 GB of RAM, and
> I am wondering if they will work fine even with the PAE
> option activated: are all the required drivers (RAID mfid, bce
> on the Dell, ciss0 on the HP) 100% compatible, or should I expect
> trouble? 
> 
Drivers that are either known to NOT work with PAE or were not
tested with PAE are excluded by the PAE config file, you can
check there.

: 0 edoofus:ttyp2:/sys/i386/conf >egrep 'ciss|mfi|bce' GENERIC PAE
: GENERIC:device          ciss            # Compaq Smart RAID 5*
: GENERIC:device          mfi             # LSI MegaRAID SAS
: GENERIC:device          bce             # Broadcom BCM5706/BCM5708 Gigabit
Ethernet

So it looks like all of them should work fine with PAE.
> If you have a working "/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/xxxx" with active
> PAE on one of these servers, I'd be interested :)
> 
> Btw, when will we see these new servers listed under:
> http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html ? 
> Or should I use send-pr ? :)
> 
And you absolutely have no option of running FreeBSD/amd64 on
them?  What a PITA!  :-)


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov
ru@FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer
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On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 22:14 +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> Drivers that are either known to NOT work with PAE or were not
> tested with PAE are excluded by the PAE config file, you can
> check there.
> So it looks like all of them should work fine with PAE.
merci!  
> > Btw, when will we see these new servers listed under:
> > http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html ? 
> > 
> And you absolutely have no option of running FreeBSD/amd64 on
> them?  What a PITA!  :-)
Ehm well, I must admit I never tried that, for a simple (and silly?)
reason: freebsd installation selects the i386 SMP kernel by default...

But of course if you (and Mike Jakubik) strongly suggest it would be a
good idea, why not, I will give a try asap :-)  Any special thing I
should take care of when switching from the i686 kernel to the amd64
one? Will the systems be quicker this way, or will it "just" help
with this 4GB memory limit?  (systems are going to be "simple" web
&
mail hosting servers, with mysql, php, qmail, clamav, etc.).

Regards,
Olivier

Olivier Mueller wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I will soon get some new servers with more than 4 GB of RAM, and
>I am wondering if they will work fine even with the PAE
>option activated: are all the required drivers (RAID mfid, bce
>on the Dell, ciss0 on the HP) 100% compatible, or should I expect
>trouble? 
>
>If you have a working "/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/xxxx" with active
>PAE on one of these servers, I'd be interested :)
>
>Btw, when will we see these new servers listed under:
>http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html ? 
>Or should I use send-pr ? :)
>
>Thanks & regards,
>Olivier
>
>_______________________________________________
>freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
>http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
>To unsubscribe, send any mail to
"freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
>  
>
I have one of these.
The ethernet device (bce) kept falling over on release as well as other 
stability problems (forget them all now)

I am running stable from September the 8th on it which appears to be a 
good time as it was before any new funkier ethernet device commits where 
a lot of people started complaining about em and bce timeout probs.

I posted a basic Ethernet speed of this machine a while back, 
92mbytes/sec is bad but its not as fast with my Dells with em devices on 
6.1 release.

Bce HP  to Em Dell
HPDL380# cat /dev/zero | dd bs=1m | nc dell2 3000
^C0+19648 records in
0+19648 records out
1287606272 bytes transferred in 13.926151 secs (92,459,594 bytes/sec)

I don't really like these machines at all compared to the Dells, mainly 
because the bios is very disappointing and even 'stupid' in my opinion.
Its important to note that in key areas its actually quite different 
from from the G4 and older generations, its hard to navigate/use and 
isn't as remotely useful compared to Dells bios, that said again is my 
opinion!

They also skimp on a bunch of things that they know most people don't 
know about, like battery backed write cache in their controller cards, 
any of the mid to high end servers you see on the Dell web site specs 
list the battery backed controller card quite clearly.
So with a default setup of these HP's you don't get any write cache from
the 256meg controller cache unless you want to go down a more dodgey 
road manually enable it and risk data loss if you loose sudden power.

I am also considering using PAE on it over its current AMD64 mode as I 
have special requirements.
I had to get one of these as we needed a machine fast which they did 
come through on.

Mike

On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 01:57:50PM -0500, Mike Jakubik
wrote:
> Olivier Mueller wrote:
> >Hello,
> >
> >I will soon get some new servers with more than 4 GB of RAM, and
> >I am wondering if they will work fine even with the PAE
> >option activated: are all the required drivers (RAID mfid, bce
> >on the Dell, ciss0 on the HP) 100% compatible, or should I expect
> >trouble? 
> >  
> 
> Why not use AMD64 mode instead of PAE?

I vote for using AMD64 mode instead of PAE. I did some testing last month
and found PAE to be very brittle. We were testing with HP DL360 (IIRC) and
found that the onboard Broadcom ether did not like PAE. The system panicked
when it went to initialize the device. 


 
Josef

-- 
Josef Grosch           | Another day closer to a | FreeBSD 6.1
jgrosch@MooseRiver.com |   Micro$oft free world  | Berkeley, Ca.
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Hi again,

On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 19:30 +0100, Olivier Mueller
wrote:
> I will soon get some new servers with more than 4 GB of RAM, and
> I am wondering if they will work fine even with the PAE
> option activated: are all the required drivers (RAID mfid, bce
> on the Dell, ciss0 on the HP) 100% compatible, or should I expect
> trouble? 
On one of the servers I can't switch to amd64 I need to use PAE setup. 
Problem, it has only usb ports (for keyboard usw.), and in the PAE 
config file, there is:

nodevice	uhci
nodevice	ohci
nodevice	ehci
nodevice	usb
nodevice	ugen
nodevice	uhid
nodevice	ukbd

-> no usb support...   So how am I supposed to access the console then? 
(there is no serial port either).  Can I remove these lines? 

regards,
Olivier

Olivier Mueller wrote:
> nodevice	uhci
> nodevice	ohci
> nodevice	ehci
> nodevice	usb
> nodevice	ugen
> nodevice	uhid
> nodevice	ukbd
> 
> -> no usb support...   So how am I supposed to access the console then? 
> (there is no serial port either).  Can I remove these lines? 
In my (limited) experience with PAE, yes, you can remove them.

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