Installation on a Dell Poweredge R805

[Tim Judd]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 10:57 AM, Chris Boyd <cboyd at gizmopartners.com> wrote:

> I'm having an issue installing FreeBSD 7 AMD64 on a Dell Poweredge R805.
>
> The system starts to boot, throws several mpt_cam_event 0x12 and 0x16
> errors, presents the boot menu, and then crashes with a "Fatal trap 12: page
> fault while in kernel mode" and then wants to reboot.
>
> This is a dual CPU, quad core Opteron 2352 system with 8GB RAM and dual SAS
> on a PERC6 controller.  I've tried various memory and BIOS settings to see
> if I can get it to boot, but it either does the bits describe above, or
> hangs hard.
>
> Any and all suggestions appreciated.
>
> --Chris
>
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1: PERC6 is not listed as supported, last time I checked.
2: Dells are notorious for not working very well with !Windows, !Linux
(haven't tried something like Open Solaris)

I have a new PE2950's at the office, FreeBSD sees everything, including the
PERC6i controller, but the motherboard NICs are suffering horribly bad for
performance.  Ping flood from the console to it's own IP address bound to
the NIC looses 30% of it's packets.  Also, what's "NIC2" on the
motherboard/case labeling, is the first NIC FreeBSD finds.  NIC1 is the 2nd
nic FreeBSD finds.  Just oddities.

Honestly, I would either stick with IBM or iXsystems branded machines.
Others may have success, but those two just seem the best I've seen.  Custom
builds are always an option too, and the warranties for custom builds are
often equal, or longer, than a brand-name machine, but you have to talk to
each device vendor, instead of "Dell" for example.

--Tim