freebsd stable - Nov 2005 - freebsd-stable Digest, Vol 136, Issue 3

There is no doubt that a lot of people have stable FreeBSD systems on Dell
hardware. The strange thing is though that there are also a lot of people
having problems with 1750's and 1850's (and therefore 2850's as
well, as
they have an identical board).

We have installed about 4 1750's and 8 1850/2850's in the last year and
_all_ except 1 of them have the "automatic reboot" feature (using
4_10,
4_11, 5_3 and 5_4). We've had 1 lockup on the 1750 but have been unable to
trace that to a cause, might be unrelated. Strangely, the 1750 that does
ok is the one with the highest load (pushing several Mbits and an average
load >2) and running 5.3-RC3.

Any clues? (Best tip so far: disable USB that causes an IRQ conflict).

Regards
Rutger Bevaart


Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 10:16:02 -0500
From: Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>
Subject: Re: FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?
To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Message-ID: <174F8D1C-9F10-4CDC-A902-B4E91BB42DE2@khera.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

On Nov 20, 2005, at 1:24 PM, Rutger Bevaart wrote:
> Both experience the "auto reboot" feature. The mbufs on the 2850
> look like a counter (signed/unsigned) bug, maybe even just in the
> printing. Other than that I'm having a hard time interpreting these
> results.
FreeBSD 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x have been stable for me on all Dell hardware.

4.x (currently 4.11) has been running on 1550's, 1650's, 2650 and
1750's for > 3 years
5.4 on 2450  for ~6 months
6.0 on 1750, 1850, and 2650 since 6.0-RC2, currently running 6.0-REL.

Never a flake-out not due to a hardware failure, and that only on two
of the 1550s over 4 years' time.  I did have the 5.4 box running 5.4-
REL-p7 lockup once, but was unable to determine the cause.

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Rutger Bevaart wrote:
>
> There is no doubt that a lot of people have stable FreeBSD systems on Dell
> hardware. The strange thing is though that there are also a lot of people
> having problems with 1750's and 1850's (and therefore 2850's as
well, as
> they have an identical board).
>
> We have installed about 4 1750's and 8 1850/2850's in the last year
and
> _all_ except 1 of them have the "automatic reboot" feature (using
4_10,
> 4_11, 5_3 and 5_4). We've had 1 lockup on the 1750 but have been unable
to
> trace that to a cause, might be unrelated. Strangely, the 1750 that does
> ok is the one with the highest load (pushing several Mbits and an average
> load >2) and running 5.3-RC3.
I ran -CURRENT on a 1750 during performance tests in March -- that
eventually became 6.0. Solid as a rock.

You might look into putting RedHat or Windows on the machine and
installing the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator and checking if its
complaining about anything.  These reboots could be caused by multibit ECC
errors which would be logged to the hardware log.

You can download OMSA from Dell's site if you go to the downloads page for
the machine and select "Server Administration" as the category (I
think --
they move that around).

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite@gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org