Anybody Use 2 or More CPU at Production Env. ( SMP )

[Adam Maloney]

> 	I watching freebsd-stable list I saw that somebody have a problem
> with SMP support which they are using 4.9 . I know that some improvement are

Hey, that was me!

> coming with 5.x .... But this problem are very important for example
> somebody when enable SMP support system start to reset itself or under high
> load crashed ?!!!!! 
> 
Ours went down regardless of load - it was very consistent, every 30
minutes.  This is the first time that we've had an issue with it.  As I
said in my post to -stable, we ran it as SMP under 4.8-REL and 4.8-STA
perfectly until we upgraded to 4.9 in late November.  The GENERIC
4.9-STA kernel worked fine for a couple of weeks without SMP turned on.
It was just on Tuesday when we re-built the kernel with SMP support that
we had the problems.  For now we have gone back to single-processor mode
and are operating normally again. 

> 	I wonder Does anybody use SMP Support without Problem . Because SMP
> is very important things ... 
> 
> 	I wonder too What about HyperThreading ?! 
> 
We had "options HTT" defined in the config under 4.8, but under 4.9 you
don't have to specify it anymore.  So the only changes we made from the
GENERIC kernel were "options SMP" and "options APIC_IO"

I will (hesitantly, hoping to avoid the inevitable flame war that will
follow) admit that the system is a Compaq Proliant 5500R with 4x500MHz
Xeons.  This is the only compaq we have, and the only multi-processor
system we have running FreeBSD, so I can't compare our problems to
anything else.

I think in general the SMP support in FreeBSD is very good, and very
stable.  I'm relatively certain that my problem is specific to my
hardware (IRQ sharing maybe).  I can only pray that the FreeBSD gods
have some further troubleshooting steps for me (I haven't checked the
-stable list for replies yet...I'll cross my fingers).

Adam Maloney
Systems Administrator
Sihope Communications