[geeks] FreeBSD advice please?

[Phil Stracchino]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> 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.

Right.  Doh!  I knew that .......

Nevertheless, it appears disabling hyperthreading in the BIOS fixed the
hang-at-mount-root-from-CD problem.  Which is fine by me.

>> 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?

Not yet.  But I can try plugging it in the other PCI-X slot.


> 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.


OK, that looks like the odds are strongly *against* this processor
stepping *not* having 64-bit support.  I'll go ahead and download the
amd64 ISOs and burn new CDs.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.