Unable to install 8.x on a PowerEdge R810

[Mahlon E. Smith]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010, Sean Bruno wrote:
> 
> 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"


Thanks for the suggestions, Sean.

On a whim I decided to try with 8.1-RELEASE (since I obviously started
trying to get this goin' before it came out) -- lo, it put me right into
the sysinstall. ... that was an easy fix.  Heh.  (Is kern.smb.disabled
set for the 8.1 install or something?  I didn't change anything
in between attempts.)  In any event -- yaaaaay!

Install worked great, though it appears I need to keep hyperthreading
("logical processors" bios option) disabled for it to boot reliably.
Similar errors as before if I enable it.

    real memory  = 103079215104 (98304 MB)
    avail memory = 99492831232 (94883 MB)
    ACPI APIC Table: <DELL   PE_SC3  >
    FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 24 CPUs
    FreeBSD/SMP: 4 package(s) x 6 core(s)

Holy cow, that's a nice sight.

Got one panic shortly after getting it on the network:
    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7234177/panic.jpg

... but it looks like I'll have a lot of kernel and sysctl tweaking to
do regardless ("ix0: RX Descriptors exceed system mbuf max, using default
instead!"), so I'll report back to the list if the panic re-appears after
some tuning.

--
Mahlon E. Smith  
http://www.martini.nu/contact.html
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