Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:25:42 -0500 (EST) From: "Greg A. Woods" <woods@weird.com> To: Wilko Bulte <wb@freebie.xs4all.nl> Cc: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FYI, no-go with booting FreeBSD-5.3 on AlphaServer ES40 Message-ID: <m1CctCo-0024gJC@building.weird.com> In-Reply-To: <20041210211612.GA90601@freebie.xs4all.nl> References: <m1CcZTT-0024g4C@building.weird.com> <20041210202803.GI90137@freebie.xs4all.nl> <m1CcrzH-0024gJC@building.weird.com> <20041210211612.GA90601@freebie.xs4all.nl>
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[ On Friday, December 10, 2004 at 22:16:12 (+0100), Wilko Bulte wrote: ] > Subject: Re: FYI, no-go with booting FreeBSD-5.3 on AlphaServer ES40 > > I know. Feel free to fix it. You're the FreeBSD guy, not me! ;-) I can give you (or anyone else who's qualified) console access for a few days, as well as access to the temporary netboot server, if you'd like to work on it and you have time available now or in the very near future. > > 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 > > That is bull, as I did run FreeBSD on the ES40 at work. Briefly, as > it is not my machine. To me "supported" means that it'll _work_, and do real work, for real production use, not just boot in some minimal "useless" configuration. (less than 4GB is "useless" to me! ;-) > You should not make assumptions, it is documented that dependent on the > machine model the limit is 1 or 2GB for FreeBSD. You need to update the 5.3R/hardware-alpha.html doc then (and probably the similar one for all previous releases too). There's no mention I can see in section 2.3.19 of any limit on the amount of supported RAM for the ES40. In fact the only mention I can find about any kind of RAM limit for FreeBSD/alpha is in the section about the 8200/8400's where it says that only 2GB has been tested (though several mentions are made of 28GB possibilities). What it does not say though is that anything more than 2GB will NOT work. If it won't work then you have to say that clearly. I wouldn't want an 8x00 machine with just 4GB or less either. You might also want to note that problem with the sym(4) driver too -- it doesn't look like it's going to work -- or is that just another symptom of having too much RAM for the whole system to cope? (The isp(4) driver isn't listed as supporting the 2342, but the complaints it spits out are worring too.) > Go and run Tru64 for a UNIX that makes full use of the ES40. None of the > *BSD or Linux will if you look at it more or less closely. NetBSD-1.6.2_STABLE works amazingly well with all 16GB of RAM and all four CPUs (with a couple of minor pmap patches), and the isp(4) driver works great and is very fast with the pair of Qlogic 2342 cards we have connecting it to each side of an Apple Xserve RAID shelf. (~35MB/sec from each LUN simultaneously with a simple "dd" from a file in the filesystem -- about as fast as the Xserve can go I think with RAID-5 on 7 spindles) NetBSD-current boots and works well on it too of course, but I'm building a production mail and web server so I won't run -current (and 2.0, though it has more efficient SMP, and UFSv2, is too new! ;-).... The only problem I'm having is that the bge(4) and sk(4) drivers, which were ported from FreeBSD, but a long time ago, make some rather bad PC-based assumptions about allocating DMA segments and either perform very poorly or not at all. Of course the NetBSD wm(4) driver for the Intel PRO/1000 cards has similar problems, though I can at least get it up to ~30MB/s with ttcp (one stream or many it max's out the same). I was hoping to test the newer version of the FreeBSD bge(4) and sk(4) drivers, as well as the FreeBSD em(4) driver (and maybe nge(4) as well) to see if any had any significant improvements worth looking at over their NetBSD counterparts. Note that since I can read up to 70MB/s (or more -- I have some SCSI drives attached too) from the filesystems then I need to be able to push it out the network that fast too, or else I'm wasting my client's time and money. Tru64 can indeed push the bge card up to 50 MB/s (and with only about 4% CPU utilization, assuming their OS isn't hiding interrupt cycles from the getrusage() system time numbers), so I know it can be done! If I could get even that same speed with a *BSD driver then I'd be very happy because I could put a pair of cards in it (one on each PCI bus) and give it two addresses to load balance since it really has two separate functions. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com> Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>
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