freebsd-stable Digest, Vol 136, Issue 3

[Rutger Bevaart]

There is no doubt that a lot of people have stable FreeBSD systems on Dell
hardware. The strange thing is though that there are also a lot of people
having problems with 1750's and 1850's (and therefore 2850's as well, as
they have an identical board).

We have installed about 4 1750's and 8 1850/2850's in the last year and
_all_ except 1 of them have the "automatic reboot" feature (using 4_10,
4_11, 5_3 and 5_4). We've had 1 lockup on the 1750 but have been unable to
trace that to a cause, might be unrelated. Strangely, the 1750 that does
ok is the one with the highest load (pushing several Mbits and an average
load >2) and running 5.3-RC3.

Any clues? (Best tip so far: disable USB that causes an IRQ conflict).

Regards
Rutger Bevaart


Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 10:16:02 -0500
From: Vivek Khera <vivek at khera.org>
Subject: Re: FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?
To: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
Message-ID: <174F8D1C-9F10-4CDC-A902-B4E91BB42DE2 at khera.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

On Nov 20, 2005, at 1:24 PM, Rutger Bevaart wrote:

> Both experience the "auto reboot" feature. The mbufs on the 2850
> look like a counter (signed/unsigned) bug, maybe even just in the
> printing. Other than that I'm having a hard time interpreting these
> results.

FreeBSD 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x have been stable for me on all Dell hardware.

4.x (currently 4.11) has been running on 1550's, 1650's, 2650 and
1750's for > 3 years
5.4 on 2450  for ~6 months
6.0 on 1750, 1850, and 2650 since 6.0-RC2, currently running 6.0-REL.

Never a flake-out not due to a hardware failure, and that only on two
of the 1550s over 4 years' time.  I did have the 5.4 box running 5.4-
REL-p7 lockup once, but was unable to determine the cause.