Unable to install 8.x on a PowerEdge R810
Sean Bruno
seanbru at yahoo-inc.com
Thu Jul 22 22:04:29 UTC 2010
On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 14:38 -0700, Mahlon E. Smith wrote:
> Picked up a couple of these powerhouse machines to be VirtualBox hosts.
> 24 core, 96G of RAM. Trying to put (amd64) both 8.0-RELEASE and 8.1-RC2
> on it with no luck whatsoever so far. Any help provided would be greatly
> appreciated, I'm chomping at the bit pretty hard to put this hardware to
> use, and was fairly surprised that FreeBSD didn't work on it through the
> gate.
>
> I've grabbed some screenshots from the DRAC, and dumped them here:
>
> http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/7234177/1/r810?h=f5fb1d
>
> (sorry, I realize that's not -incredibly- helpful and partially
> truncated. I'm currently limited to what I can screenshot, though I
> suppose I could boot via console and log it all... come to think of it,
> I'll go give that a try to get more comprehensive output.)
>
> If I disable all the CPU options in the BIOS, I can get it to boot, but
> it hangs after mounting md0 (I never see the sysinstall screen.) Same
> deal if I try booting in safe mode or without ACPI.
>
> Otherwise, it spews errors for about 30 seconds so quickly I can't read
> them, then panics with a page fault in swapper.
>
> I'm sure we'd like to get BSD installing reliably on such a beast, and
> I'm more than happy to play the guinea pig if someone would be willing
> to provide some direction with some things to try. Help! These are
> expensive paperweights! :)
>
> --
> Mahlon E. Smith
> http://www.martini.nu/contact.html
Funny you should mention this box. I've been arm wrestling with this
beastie for a couple of weeks and finally had some amount of success
today.
A couple of things:
1. Reduce your RAM to 64G (seriously)
2. Don't use the H200 Dell RAID controller. It's not supported yet.
-- Use the 6i or whatever the mfi(4) card is called.
3. Don't compile in the ipmi(4) when you get the system up.
-- I know there's an unpatched problem on 7 that is fixed in HEAD, but
have no idea if its patched in 8
4. Try doing serial console installs.
-- at the Beastie prompt, hit [6]. then at the OK prompt, type "set
console=comconsole"
Sean
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