freebsd stable - Sep 2013 - FreeBSD 9-Stable + Atom D510 Freeze

I have an Intel Atom D510 motherboard that is being used in my home router 
for
the last several years.  It started on FreeBSD 8-Stable and was recently 
upgraded
to FreeBSD 9-Stable.  Through the years I have observed spurious reboots when
rebuilding ports, but never world or kernel.  I have tried both schedulers in
FreeBSD 8-Stable.  I have also replaced memory, power supply and disk drives
to attempt to isolate hardware from the equation.  Last evening I had a 
complete
freeze when rebuilding tshark.  The keyboard was dead, screen display was 
frozen
and no network access.  I recovered by pressing the reset switch.  As always,
there are no log entries about panic or core dumps in the swap partition.

My question to the group is whether FreeBSD is correctly identifying the 
number
of CPU's on this motherboard.  I see 4 listed in the top utility and it 
appears
that code is being run on all 4.  Are HT CPU's equal in performance to
'real'
ones and should they participate fully in the task scheduler operation?  
Since
my problem is very intermittant and non-reproducable, is it possible that 
code
may try to exercise something in a HT core that should only be run on a 
'real'
one?

My DMESG:

Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: Copyright (c) 1992-2013 The FreeBSD Project.
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 
1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: The Regents of the University of California. All 
rights reserved.
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD 
Foundation.
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: FreeBSD 9.2-PRERELEASE #2: Sat Sep 14 18:27:55 
EDT 2013
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: 
root at xxxxx.xxxxx.xxxxx:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/ROUTER amd64   
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: gcc version 4.2.1 20070831 patched [FreeBSD]
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU D510   @ 1.66GHz 
(1662.72-MHz K8-class CPU)
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x106ca 
Family =
0x6  Model = 0x1c  Stepping = 10
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: 
Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,C
MOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,
FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: 
Features2=0x40e31d<SSE3,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,MOVBE>
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: AMD Features=0x20100800<SYSCALL,NX,LM>
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: AMD Features2=0x1<LAHF>
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: TSC: P-state invariant, performance statistics
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: real memory  = 1073741824 (1024 MB)
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: avail memory = 1002127360 (955 MB)
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: Event timer "LAPIC" quality 400
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: ACPI APIC Table: <INTEL  MOPNV10N>
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 4 
CPUs
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: FreeBSD/SMP: 1 package(s) x 2 core(s) x 2 HTT 
threads
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  0
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: cpu1 (AP/HT): APIC ID:  1
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: cpu2 (AP): APIC ID:  2
Sep 18 20:50:19 mail kernel: cpu3 (AP/HT): APIC ID:  3

Tom

-- 
Public Keys:
PGP KeyID = 0x5F22FDC1
GnuPG KeyID = 0x620836CF

> 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.

Tom

-- 
Public Keys:
PGP KeyID = 0x5F22FDC1
GnuPG KeyID = 0x620836CF