From owner-freebsd-hardware  Thu Jan  7 12:22:40 1999
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From: Richard Cownie <tich@ma.ikos.com>
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Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 15:23:09 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <199901072023.PAA12219@lonesome.ma.ikos.com>
To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: SC450NX - thanks for patches
Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
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X-Loop: FreeBSD.org

Here's the latest on the SC450NX quad-Xeon machine

1) With this patch to i386/i386/pmap.c (thanks to Luoqi Chen)
   it now runs with 2GB DRAM

  >In i386/i386/pmap.c function pmap_init(), try to move the allocation of
  >kptobj to the beginning of the function (before the kmem_alloc call).

2) With this patch to pci/ncr.c (thanks to Gerard Roudier) it can
   now find and boot the kernel using the onboard 53C896 scsi

  >If you want the driver to work immediately for you, the following trick 
  >should be enough, but it is not kind of beauty, by the way:
  >
  >$ vi ncr.c
  >:1,$ s/ctest0/sdid/g

3) With the disk on the 53C896 scsi, it fails to mount the root
   filesystem (perhaps because moving the disk causes confusion ?)
   So I'm still using the Adaptec 2940 for now.

4) Increasing the process size limit to 2GB seems to cause some
   trouble - the system boots, but the console getty complains and
   doesn't put up a login prompt.
   
   Kernel configured with this has the problem:

     options "MAXDSIZ=(2000*1024*1024)"
     options "DFLDSIZ=(2000*1024*1024)"

   Kernel configured with this is ok:

     options "MAXDSIZ=(1800*1024*1024)"
     options "MAXDSIZ=(1800*1024*1024)"

5) Performance is good, 400MHz Xeon is 1.35 x faster than 300MHz Ultrasparc2
   on our application (compiling Verilog onto a box full of FPGA's) -
   and the SC450NX is about $11.5K, compared to about $30K for a
   dual UltraSPARC.  With 500MHz Tanner cpu's (in March ?) the SC450NX
   will be just awesome.

Thanks to everyone for helping to make this fly

  Richard Cownie (tich@ma.ikos.com)



 

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