Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 12:46:57 -0500 (EST) From: "Michael Richards" <michael@fastmail.ca> To: oliver.blasnik@de.tiscali.com Cc: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Intel SE7500CW2 narrowed down... Message-ID: <3DEE3F91.000019.37680@ns.interchange.ca>
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> Hello John,
>
>> SMP is only broken on i386 for P4's on this one motherboard.
>> It works perfectly fine on other motherboards.
>
> This isn't my perception after reading PRs every day and also
> trying out FreeBSD/SMP-STABLE+CURRENT sometimes on some of our
> labs hardware.
We've been running FreeBSD-SMP for 3 years now under some very
heavily loaded servers without a problem. Ok, the SMP isn't the
fastest implementation but I've found the 5.0-DP2 on our alpha runs
pretty fast even compared to a similar Tru64 machine.
>> I can tell you that the way in which we startup CPU's is quite
>> within the IA-32 spec and that it's probably about 90% that this
>> motherboard has some h0rked BIOS.
>
> I know of this BIOS / tables problem. But why is f. ex. Linux able
> to boot up without any glitch and works as fast as expected (not
> knowing it from exactly this board, but from others I tested)?
I'm not convinced it's a tables problem as I read the spec and
verified the CPU entries in this table byte for byte. It appears
valid. Besides, Linux works and so do a host of other OSes. More than
likely we're just doing something slightly different that happens to
work find with all the other boards out there.
My next step is to start looking at how linux works and compare it to
how FreeBSD doesn't work.
-Michael
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