Side note on Shuttle XPC / AMD X2 (SN95G5V3) (Re: [PATCH] nve(4)
locking cleanup)
Scott Long
scottl at samsco.org
Thu Nov 17 23:51:56 PST 2005
Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :I found someone. :) They don't have an X2 processor, just a 6400, and it does
> :seem that the MP Table in there case does have some busted entries. However,
> :the link devices used for APIC routing do work ok so with ACPI enabled 6.0
> :booted up ok out of the box with APIC enabled. Probably they (Shuttle) got
> :by with a busted MP Table because Windows probably just uses ACPI and worked
> :fine out of the box.
> :
> :--
> :John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
>
> Buy an AMD Athlon X2 for that person so you can get SMP working, and
> see if you hit the IRQ 7 problem. If the system has to reroute anything
> through the 8259 (e.g. like the clock interrupt), you will probably
> see spurious irq 7's. If it disables the 8259 entirely it should be ok.
> I suspect that if the ACPI link entries are good, that will be the
> only problem you face getting SMP working.
>
Luckily, we no longer have to worry about routing the 8254 through the
AT-PIC anymore in FreeBSD. More and more chipsets and motherboards are
axeing the logic to make this work, and it's a loosing battle to keep
on trying to work around it. It wouldn't be too surprising if the
8259 goes away entirely in the next 2-3 years on Athlon and Opteron
designs.
> Note that I did a followup commit to the one I posted to clean
> up my programming option for the hypertransport configuration. The
> one I posted was just an initial workaround. Look at the CVS logs
> for more info. Those configuration registers are insane and the
> Shuttle BIOS clearly misprogrammed the one I was finally able to
> track down.
>
> I intend to implement the link entry stuff for DragonFly after our
> next release. For this release we already have too many feature items
> and not enough time to stabilize yet another one... so that will be
> post-release work.
>
> I have to say that the new Shuttle XPC populated with an Athlon X2
> is a really nifty machine. It's ultra fast, SMP, yet much, much quieter
> then older slower shuttles. It runs nice and cool. It is clearly a
> bug winner for Shuttle and AMD.
It does look nice.
Scott
More information about the freebsd-current
mailing list