DL360 G3 w/ AMD64 Cant boot from CD

Tom Evans tevans.uk at googlemail.com
Tue Nov 4 08:59:55 PST 2008


On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 11:18 -0500, Kevin wrote:
> > > I tried 7.1-BETA2 , but unfortunately the same problem happened. I
> > tried
> > > (for the sake of argument) Debian debian-40r5-amd64 , and it wouldn't
> > boot
> > > either -- it said "Your CPU does not support long mode, please use a
> > 32bit
> > > distribution".
> > 
> > This means your processor does not support 64-bit mode.
> > 
> > > How would I support over 4GB of ram with only i386 distributions?
> > 
> > There is only one option: use PAE mode, which has drawbacks.  You can
> > read about what PAE is on Wikipedia.
> > 
> > Note that not all drivers are PAE mode compatible on FreeBSD.  You
> > should be able to install i386 FreeBSD with success, then rebuild your
> > kernel with PAE enabled.  Look at /sys/i386/conf/PAE for an example
> > configuration -- you'll see all of the drivers you have to disable for
> > PAE to work successfully.  If your system uses any of these drivers,
> > PAE
> > mode will not work for you, in which case you should upgrade your
> > hardware.
> > 
> > --
> > | Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
> > | Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
> > | UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
> > | Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
> 
> 
> Is my issue related to non-supporting of 64bit mode (2x Dual Xeons in the
> DL360 G3) , or perhaps due to a boot loader bug?
> 
> I found this PR :
> 
> 91492 freebsd- amd64    feedback  serious   medium   current-us [boot] BTX
> halted
> 
> 
> In any case , the latest 6.4/7.1 Snapshot produced the same BTX Halt error.
> I'll just use i386 w/ PAE for now I suppose. I haven't tested AMD64 with
> DL360 G4's or DL360 G5's , but I'd appreciate if anyone has tested those
> generations w/ FreeBSD AMD64 , to let me know if the problem persists in
> some form.
> 
> 
> Thank you.

If your CPUs don't support LM (long mode, aka amd64), then booting an
amd64 image wont get very far. Judging from the ubuntu message, your
CPUs dont. If you have installed/booted FreeBSD, you can find out what
your CPU supports by looking at the Features mentioned in dmesg:

> $ grep Features /var/run/dmesg.boot
Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,
CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
Features2=0xe3fd<SSE3,DTES64,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM>
  AMD Features=0x20100000<NX,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x1<LAHF>

Iif your CPU supported amd64, it would be mentioned in AMD Features (as
LM).

Tom




More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list