Core 2 Duo and FreeBSD

[Antony Mawer]

On 10/11/2006 1:52 PM, Olexandr Prokhorenko wrote:
> I¹m considering getting a new Core 2 Duo (Intel® Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU
> 2.13GHz) server to run under FreeBSD.  I briefly searched the Internet and
> found some concerns and trouble reports about FreeBSD and Core 2 Duo
> servers.  I really need to use this server for high load production use and
> it¹s not acceptable for me to have the server running into any kind of
> problems, crashes, or whatever else.  As an alternative to Core 2 Duo, I was
> thinking about Intel® Pentium® D 945 Dual Core 3.4GHz, but I was told that
> it has significantly less power.

It would help to know what sort of system you are looking at - eg. 
vendor & model number or at least the motherboard manufacturer and 
model. This will likely have a great deal of impact on the stability of 
the drivers for the system. The Core 2 Duo chips are definitely worth 
considering in favour of the more mediocre Pentium D's.

I recently build a Core 2 Duo based system on an Intel DQ965GF 
motherboard, with which I had issues with the onboard Marvell PATA 
controller not working. I was able to work around the issue by using a 
PCI PATA controller for the CD-ROM during installation, after which the 
drive was no longer needed. The onboard SATA II ports appeared to work 
fine, and the system survived load testing running an SMP kernel on 
6.2-BETA3 (at the time) without any apparent issues.

You may want to hang out for 6.2-RELEASE before committing the server to 
production, as there have been issues regarding the em (Intel GBit) 
driver in the candidates leading up to the release.

--Antony