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Date:      Mon, 10 Jun 2002 12:34:56 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Peter Van Epp <vanepp@sfu.ca>
To:        freebsd-smp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Athelon APIC problems?
Message-ID:  <200206101934.MAA24179@fraser.sfu.ca>

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	Before I try and beat up my vendor more :-) are there known problems
with APIC I/O on dual Athelons with FreeBSD 4-5 Release? I have a pair of 
Tyan Thunder K7X S2468NG Motherboards each with 512 Megs of ECC ram and
dual MP1900 (1.6 Gig) AMD Athelon CPUs. Redhat Linux 7.3 (out of our beowolf
cluster which is 96 nodes of dual Athelons) runs fine on both boxes. FreeBSD
4.5-Release runs fine on one of them and fails most of the time during boot
on the other one. Our Linux expert told me there were a lot of problems with 
the APIC I/O support for the Athelons on Linux (and in fact he ran for a long
time without APIC I/O enabled which doesn't appear to be an option on FreeBSD).
He suggests that since it was intermittent that may be in fact what I'm seeing
here and why one board seems to work when the other doesn't (as opposed to one
board/CPU has a hardware problem). The vendor has swapped the Motherboard on 
the problem machine without effect. Before continuing to chase hardware problems
(which may not exist) I thought I'd ask if there are known issues with 
Athelons.
	While I may yet just end up running Linux, the interest in FreeBSD is
that under the netpipe benchmark, while speed under FreeBSD is much spottier
than Linux (~650 Mbps against ~685 Mbps on Linux) CPU time is about half for
Linux and only 1/3 for FreeBSD (implying more CPU time left for useful work
on FreeBSD if it can be made stable).

Peter Van Epp / Operations and Technical Support 
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada

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