From owner-freebsd-proliant@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jun 16 05:56:42 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-proliant@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3CFB5106567B for ; Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:56:42 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from derwood@naebunny.net) Received: from mail.naebunny.net (mail.naebunny.net [96.11.241.234]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 115448FC17 for ; Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:56:41 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail.naebunny.net (nfs1 [127.0.0.1]) by mail.naebunny.net (Naebunny Mail Server. Spammers will be reported) with ESMTP id 34C7E5084D for ; Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:37:28 -0400 (EDT) Received: from [192.168.0.20] (unknown [192.168.0.20]) by mail.naebunny.net (Naebunny Mail Server. Spammers will be reported) with ESMTP id 184795084B for ; Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:37:28 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <4C18631C.3000606@naebunny.net> Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:37:32 -0400 From: Darin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Thunderbird/3.0.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-proliant@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV using ClamSMTP Subject: DL580 and PAE questions X-BeenThere: freebsd-proliant@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Technical discussion of FreeBSD on HP ProLiant server platforms." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:56:42 -0000 Hello, I was recently gifted an HP DL580 G2 server. I do some hosting for family and friends and was looking forward to putting FreeBSD on. I've run FreeBSD for a long time, but on smaller systems, mostly with 1 or 2 CPUs and maybe 2 GB or memory max. It currently has four 1.4ghz Xeon MP processors and 16 GB of memory. I read up on PAE and all the risks involved. I really don't have much of a choice about PAE. Even the fastest CPU the DL 580 G2 will take is a 3 ghz Xeon MP (stepping sl79v) which also does not support 64bit. I installed 8.1 BETA1 and managed to get PAE compiled in. One of the options I set was KVA_PAGES. Everything I read instructed me to use a number thats divisible by 4.. And an example that was given was 256 KVA_PAGES per 1 gig.. So, since the system has 16 gigs, I set KVA_PAGES to 4096, compiled and rebooted. It hung the system. So, I recovered the old kernel and tried again.. This time I set to KVA_PAGES to 1024 and recompiled. This time it booted fine, and it sees the whole 16 gig of mem: Jun 16 00:58:53 kernel: CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 1.40GHz (1399.96-MHz 686-class CPU) Jun 16 00:58:53 kernel: Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0xf11 Family = f Model = 1 Stepping = 1 Jun 16 00:58:53 kernel: Features=0x3febf9ff Jun 16 00:58:53 kernel: real memory = 17179869184 (16384 MB) Jun 16 00:58:53 kernel: avail memory = 16504066048 (15739 MB) So, I was pretty happy. This brings me to my question. Should I be concerned about the KVA_PAGES setting and try tinkering with it? If I leave it at 1024, will I have problems? Does anyone have experience they're willing to share about PAE extensions and what the proper setting for KVA_PAGES should be? Also, are there any other tunables that I should be changing? Thanks for reading Darin -