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From: "Greg A. Woods" <woods@weird.com>
To: Wilko Bulte <wb@freebie.xs4all.nl>
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cc: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FYI, no-go with booting FreeBSD-5.3 on AlphaServer ES40
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[ On Friday, December 10, 2004 at 21:28:03 (+0100), Wilko Bulte wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: FYI, no-go with booting FreeBSD-5.3 on AlphaServer ES40
>
> FreeBSD does not even support 4GB so don't moan... :-P

Sigh....

Any ES40 with fewer than 4 memory options installed (i.e. 8GB _minimum_)
is a huge waste of space, energy, and money.  With just 2 RAM options
installed (i.e. 4GB minimum), the machine is way under-utilized and can
only achieve 1/2 its memory throughput.  With just one RAM option
installed (i.e. 2GB minimum), the machine crawls at 1/4 its potential
memory throughput.

There are many better, faster, cheaper, smaller, types of systems
available if one does not need to break the 4GB 32-bit address space
boundary.

I.e. I guess FreeBSD doesn't really truly support the ES40 (or anything
bigger) at all.  You should definitely not list them as supported!  I'm
sure anyone else familiar with Alphas would make the same assumption as
I have that the full RAM configurations of any supported machine would
work -- that's the whole reason for wanting a 64-bit address space in
the first place!


> But surely not on 16G RAM.

BUT, that's only half-way to where we want to go with 32GB installed...

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>          Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>