FreeBSD 8.0, Intel Xeon E5530, Dell R410, only 2 cores available

[Hoang V.D. | Creative Solutions GmbH]

I would like to thanks both of you John and Ivan for your assistance. We think 
we have found out the cause of the problem now, this thread from Dell's "Linux 
PowerEdge" list probably explained it:

http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2010-January/041159.html

For some weird reason Dell decided to turn off two cores per CPU by default (not
HT but real cores) for those servers. We will ask the datacenter guys to look at
that specific BIOS option tomorrow and fix it.

Again, many thanks from happy FreeBSD users :-)

Best regards,
Hoang

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Baldwin [mailto:jhb at freebsd.org]
> Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 5:51 PM
> To: Hoang V.D. | Creative Solutions GmbH
> Cc: freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 8.0, Intel Xeon E5530, Dell R410, only 2 cores available
> 
> Yes, they are disabled in both the APIC and SRAT (NUMA info) tables.  CPUs
> here mean SMT threads.  Effectively each logical CPU that is visible to the
> OS should be listed in the ACPI APIC table.
> 
> Grr, it looks like cpuid hasn't been updated to parse the cpuid bits that
> tell you how many threads and cores there are for a single package, but I
> suspect it would tell you the same thing that FreeBSD is claiming.  What does
> your BIOS say about the number of cores in your CPU?
> 
> --
> John Baldwin