FreeBSD newbie general and SMP questions for i386]

[Josh Paetzel]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:42:19PM -0800, Mark Wolfskehl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a FreeBSD newbie.  I'm considering installing either FreeBSD i386 or 
> Linux on a 2 AMD Athelon CPU machine.  The motherboard is an ASUS 
> A7M266-D, and the machine has 2GB memory installed.  I'm working on 
> trying to answer some key questions before making a final decision which 
> OS to install (right now the other alternative is SuSe Linux), but 
> perhaps if anyone has some quick answers that would be a help:
> 
> 1. How stable is SMP support in 5.1, especially compared to the 
> stability of single CPU FreeBSD and Linux in general?

I'm running FreeBSD 5.1 on a dual p-pro system, 4.9 on a dual AMD system, 
and until recently I was running Debian Linux on a dual p3...I can't say that 
any of them were unstable.  

> 
> 2. In general, how could I characterize the relative performance of 
> FreeBSD and Linux under an SMP kernel and/.or single processors?
> 
> 3. I'm looking into whether my motherboard conforms to the FreeBSD 
> requirements.  I don't know if the 'Intel MP' means you have to have 
> genuine Intel processors, in particular.  If anyone can get a quick 
> answer to this, that would be critical, of course.  ASUS's website is 
> www.asus.com, and you can just do a search for the motherboard model.  
> They have all the specs and the users manual in pdf online.  Thanks in 
> advance.

I'm running a dual socket A Gigabyte motherboard, and the only issue that I've 
had with it is that the system hangs if I try to use the nvidia drivers for 
X.  I've heard from someone with a Tyan Tiger board using the same chipset 
(MPX) that they've had the same problem.  Other than that I've had no issues 
at all.

Josh Paetzel