[geeks] FreeBSD advice please?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Phil Stracchino wrote:

>> You might want to try disabling the HPET from the bios if that option
>> is available to you.
>
> I found a BIOS option to disable hyperthreading, and did so since I
> don't really care that much about it anyway.

HPET isn't hyperthreading; it's a high-precision timer.

> This morning, the 9500 is back to spewing errors (all I can catch is
> something about tma0 and PCI and parity).

Have you moved it to a different slot?

>> P.S if you're interested in trying ZFS on FreeBSD you'll need to use
>> the amd64 version, if your cpu's will support it.
>
> ZFS is only supported on FreeBSD on AMD64?  If soi, I'm not going to get
> very far with dual Intel Xeons then ...

I run FreeBSD/amd64 on a pair of Xeon processors.  The BSDs refer to
"x86_64"[0] as "amd64", which is, IMO, far more fair.  After all, most OSes
referred to the 32-bit Intel ABI as "i386", so why not give AMD credit for
theirs, as well?

If your system will run 64-bit binaries, you'll likely want to run the
FreeBSD/amd64 distribution, unless you have need of software that will
only run on FreeBSD/i386.

  $ uname -srp && dmesg | grep ^CPU
  FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE amd64
  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU   E5345  @ 2.33GHz (2327.51-MHz K8-class CPU)

Referring to it as 'K8-class' is just delicious.


[0] Or, as Intel so very wrongly prints on their development
     documentation: "Intel 64".
-- 
Jonathan Patschke ( "They don't have the right to read a book out loud."
Elgin, TX         (                  --Paul Aiken
USA               (                    Executive Director, Authors Guild