Peter Van Epp wrote:
> 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.
Your Linux guy was right: it's an Athlon problem.
Please see the release notes for the most recent Linux release,
which describe somewhat what Linux changed in order to get
around the problem.
For a more detailed approach that you could then apply to FreeBSD,
you will need access to the unpublished vendor Errata and/or to
look at the Linux kernel source code VM system changes between
the release that had the problem, and the release that didn't.
-- Terry
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