The machine in question has a 2-core Xeon, 2GB RAM and a new ciss-compatible controller, for which I appologise for not remembering the exact model but it's "200-something" with three attached 7.2k RPM SATA drives (so it's probably SAS-compatible) in RAID5, and 128 MB cache with BBU. I'm trying to install FreeBSD 6.2-beta3, and though all hardware is correctly detected, there are some curious problems: - The least problem: drive access is incredibly slow, but since this is a brand new machine and BIOS complains that the BBU is not filled to capacity and the controller is doing some calibration, it doesn't seem serious for now. On one burst I managed to get ~~110 MB/s reads from dd on raw device which is enough. - The less serious problem: It looks like a whole bunch of built-in devices is routed to irq 29: bce, ciss, ohci and ehci. I notice last three are giant locked, which doesn't look good, especially since this should be a loaded web server. I'll get a chance to open it after weekend, but I want to hear advice - does someone have experience with resolving such conflicts on proliants? - The showstopper: Sysinstall completes (though slowly), but on reboot the loader doesn't go further than the "F1 prompt" :( This is very curious, since when booting from install CD the loader shows it recognizes the CD drive and drives A: and C:, so BIOS seems to be ok. If I understand the loader correctly, after the "F1 prompt" phase, the loader should transfer control to the boot block of the first slice? I'll get a chance to work on it some more after weekend (after BBU is charged, hopefully), but this last issue looks like there might be a bug in sysinstall so I'm complaining early. The problems listed appear both on i386 and amd64 install images.
Ivan Voras wrote:> - The showstopper: Sysinstall completes (though slowly), but on reboot > the loader doesn't go further than the "F1 prompt" :( This is very > curious, since when booting from install CD the loader shows it > recognizes the CD drive and drives A: and C:, so BIOS seems to be ok. If > I understand the loader correctly, after the "F1 prompt" phase, the > loader should transfer control to the boot block of the first slice?There's something unusual going on and I don't know what else to try. Finally, after fiddling with various options, I've sort-of got it to work by creating two slices (s1, s2), setting root partition on s1a and the rest (/usr, /var, etc.) on s2. Now, the "F1 prompt" boot stage behaves like this: - if I leave F1 to be the default, boot fails, beeping when trying to boot like before. Nothing changes when pressing F1 multiple time (it always fails and beeps). - if I leave F2 to be the default, boot fails with "invalid partition" message and escapes to the boot: prompt - if I press F1 and then F2, it beeps on F1 but after F2 is pressed it proceeds to boot from s1a! I really don't know what is going on. The disk array is supposed to be "clean", without hidden partitions (at least, fdisk doesn't see any). Is the loader re-reading the table after a failed boot (with F1), and something corrupts the data on first read? Or maybe it's a boot0 bug? Any ideas? As it stands, the machine can't boot unattended, which makes it unusable. More info: at the /boot/loader stage, lsdev shows disk0 as A:, but the floppy doesn't exist on this machine, and disk1 as C:, with normal partitions (e.g. disk1s1a, etc.)
Ivan Voras wrote: > - The less serious problem: It looks like a whole bunch of built-in > devices is routed to irq 29: bce, ciss, ohci and ehci. I notice last > three are giant locked, which doesn't look good, especially since this > should be a loaded web server. If it's really only a web server, then you probably don't need the USB ports. In that case you should remove ohci and ehci from your kernel. The USB interrupt handler is quite heavy-weight, so it can have a noticeable impact if the interrupt is shared with other devices. Best regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way. (On the statement print "42 monkeys" + "1 snake":) By the way, both perl and Python get this wrong. Perl gives 43 and Python gives "42 monkeys1 snake", when the answer is clearly "41 monkeys and 1 fat snake". -- Jim Fulton