freebsd stable - Mar 2007 - any success with new sun "M2" product variant for X4100 and X2100

Has anyone successfully booted FreeBSD 6 on the new "M2" variants of  
sun's X2100 or X4100 boxes? I have three X4100 original versions that  
works stunningly well (but I don't use the internal disks) with  
FreeBSD 6.1.  I was just curious how the new ones work, and the X2100  
seems to fit the bill for what I currently need.

Also, if anyone knows which ethernet ports they put in that'd be  
helpful.  I'd avoid them if they had broadcom chips :-(

Hi,

We'are using an x2100m2 with FreeBSD6.2. On the ethernet side, the 
x2100m2 has two bge iface. On the original x2100 the bge iface works 
fine for me. On the M2 x2100 try ONLY FreeBSD 6.2, because 6.1 will be 
terribly slow. The x2100m2 has two sata2 disk bays, where you can insert 
almost any normal sata2 hdd-s. I had very big problems, with the orig 
x2100 satahalfhwraid on freebsd, i suggest you shoud avoid that. The 
hdd-s work fine without the hwraid (ataraid) and gmirror does the job 
nicely.

Regards,
Andras


Vivek Khera wrote:
> Has anyone successfully booted FreeBSD 6 on the new "M2" variants
of
> sun's X2100 or X4100 boxes? I have three X4100 original versions that 
> works stunningly well (but I don't use the internal disks) with 
> FreeBSD 6.1.  I was just curious how the new ones work, and the X2100 
> seems to fit the bill for what I currently need.
>
> Also, if anyone knows which ethernet ports they put in that'd be 
> helpful.  I'd avoid them if they had broadcom chips :-(
>

On Mar 8, 2007, at 4:45 PM, Jens Fallesen wrote:
> Another funny thing is that the embedded management software works  
> under MSIE only. Not exactly what I would expect from Sun. :-)
ew gross.

the description of the LOM on the X2100 claims the functionality is  
the same as the ILOM on the 4100, so that's very surprising to me.

i'll probably splurge for the X4100 again, then.  the ILOM on these  
is nothing short of spectacular.

Thanks!

On Mar 8, 2007, at 4:45 PM, Jens Fallesen wrote:
> One issue I have is that the embedded management software can run  
> on NIC 1 only. And once FreeBSD detects this, the embedded  
> management software is disabled. Does anyone know of a way to make  
> FreeBSD detect NIC 0 only?
what about something similar to this, how I disable atkbd on my sun  
boxes:

hint.atkbdc.0.disabled=1


perhaps

hint.bge.1.disabled=1

might work.

you can test by breaking into the boot loader and typing "set  
hint..." then continue the normal boot.  if it works, just plop that  
line (without set) into /boot/loader.conf.

Vivek Khera wrote:
> Has anyone successfully booted FreeBSD 6 on the new "M2" variants
of
> sun's X2100 or X4100 boxes? 
I have 6.2 running smoothly on three X2100 M2 units.

The primary NICs are Broadcom, the secondary ones are Nvidia as part of 
the chipset (FreeBSD does not recognise those).

One issue I have is that the embedded management software can run on NIC 
1 only. And once FreeBSD detects this, the embedded management software 
is disabled. Does anyone know of a way to make FreeBSD detect NIC 0 only?

Another funny thing is that the embedded management software works under 
MSIE only. Not exactly what I would expect from Sun. :-)

Apart from the issues above, I have no problems whatsoever.


--
Jens

* Vivek Khera (vivek@khera.org) wrote:
> Has anyone successfully booted FreeBSD 6 on the new "M2" variants
of
> sun's X2100 or X4100 boxes? I have three X4100 original versions that
> works stunningly well (but I don't use the internal disks) with
> FreeBSD 6.1.  I was just curious how the new ones work, and the X2100
> seems to fit the bill for what I currently need.
We have a pair of X4100M2's in production right now running 6.2, though
we run a pretty cut-down kernel that lacks USB support.  There are some
dmesg warnings related to the IOAPICs but they seem harmless:

FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 4 CPUs
cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  0
cpu1 (AP): APIC ID:  1
cpu2 (AP): APIC ID:  2
cpu3 (AP): APIC ID:  3
ioapic0: Changing APIC ID to 4
ioapic1: Changing APIC ID to 6
ioapic1: WARNING: intbase 48 != expected base 24
ioapic2: Changing APIC ID to 7
ioapic2: WARNING: intbase 56 != expected base 55
ioapic3: Changing APIC ID to 5
ioapic3: WARNING: intbase 24 != expected base 63
ioapic0 <Version 1.1> irqs 0-23 on motherboard
ioapic3 <Version 1.1> irqs 24-47 on motherboard
ioapic1 <Version 1.1> irqs 48-54 on motherboard
ioapic2 <Version 1.1> irqs 56-62 on motherboard

Disks work fine with mpt(4), just as with !M2.
> Also, if anyone knows which ethernet ports they put in that'd be  
> helpful.  I'd avoid them if they had broadcom chips :-(
2 nVidia nForce nve(4)'s and 2 Intel Pro/1000 em(4)'s.  Quite a step
back from the quad em(4)'s in !M2's, but 2 usable NIC's should be
enough
for most uses.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/

On Mar 8, 2007, at 4:45 PM, Jens Fallesen wrote:
> One issue I have is that the embedded management software can run  
> on NIC 1 only. And once FreeBSD detects this, the embedded  
> management software is disabled. Does anyone know of a way to make  
> FreeBSD detect NIC 0 only?
Did you spring for the $100 LOM card or are you just using the  
embedded software?