Trouble with new poweredge 2950 - solved

[Jerry Bell]

When I disabled hyperthreading (labelled "logical processors" in BIOS),
the system started booting.  Strange that HT would cause the system to
hang at boot.  The correct number of processors shows and the amount of
CPU time being used is properly represented.

Jerry

> I just got a PE 2950 and I'm having some problems.
>
> I installed 6.2PRE and it went well.  The first thing I noticed is that
> immediate as BSD start to load, a bold/highlighted message says "768xxx
> bytes above 4G ignore" or something like that (don't recall what xxx was.
>
> Next thing I noticed whilest trying a buildworld against the latest stable
> sources.  My system detects 8 cpus.  It actually only has 4 - 2 dual core
> xeons.  I'm guessing that the others are from hyperthreading, but I'm not
> certain.  Hyperthreading is disabled by default, I believe.  So, in the
> process of make buildworld -j 32, I noticed that only even numbered CPUs
> are being used (0,2,4,6).  Is that because BSD is ignoring the HT CPUs,
> which would be 1,3,5,7?  top and iostat both show that I was never able to
> exceed 50% overall CPU usage.  Is that because even though I have the HT
> representations disabled, the OS is using their availabilty in calculating
> % idle time?  Is there any way to get an accurate number?  The PE doesn't
> let me disable HT, I don't believe.
>
> Finally, after the upgrade, I'm having a problem with the system hanging
> on startup right after the firewall message, and sometimes right after the
> CD ROM detection message.  I believe that the SAS controller is supposed
> to be detected next, and I'm assuming that's the problem.  When I first
> tried to install, I used 6.1, and it completely didn't recognize my SAS
> controller.  I found a message in the archives that suggested trying the
> latest stable source, so I tried 6.2 and it worked.  Any ideas what could
> be causing the problem?  When I was using the 6.2PRE ISO, I had to restart
> a few times before it got past that stage also.
>
> Thanks much!
>
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