[geeks] FreeBSD advice please?

[Phil Stracchino]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
>> I wonder if I have a bad disk locking up the bus on the 3ware.  I power
>> down, eject all twelve 300GB disks, boot.  This time, I don't see any
>> 3Ware BIOS come up at all.
> ---snip---
>> I reboot.  Same result.
>>
>> I power down, physically unplug the 3Ware card, and reboot.  Same
>> result.
> ---snip---
> 
> That sounds like your card's on the way out.  For what it's worth, FreeBSD
> 7 Just Worked out with my 9650SE.

I had a nasty suspicion that might be the case.  I'm going to be really
furious at 3Ware if it turns out to have gone bad while sitting there
unused for nine months while 3Ware sat there with their thumbs up their
asses scheduling meetings to discuss debating when they were going to
get around to bothering to tell me they'd EOL'd the card.


>> This is an SMP box (two 3.2GHz Xeons with hyperthreading); is there
>> something special I need to do at bootloader time to get a kernel aware
>> of all four "logical processors"?
> 
> FreeBSD has HT turned off by default on processors that are vulnerable to
> the HT cache timing attack.  You can enable them by setting the following
> sysctl in /etc/sysctl.conf:
> 
>          machdep.hyperthreading_allowed=1

But I need to at the very least actually get the install disk booted
before I can do that, right...?  The installer kernel should be SMP
ready straight out of the box though, and should Just Work.  Right?


(Sudden thought:  there should still be a basic Solaris 10 install on
the boot disks.  Booting that ought to tell me whether there's any
hardware problem that could reasonably be keeping the machine from
booting the installer.)


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.