Latest Stable FreeBSD version and its Dell 2950 Compatiblity

[Olivier Nicole]

>         I need to know which is the latest stable FreeBSD release(6.2 ?) and
> does it goes well with Dell 2950 ?

6.3 should be the latest stable.

And yes about the 2950, with the bellow remarks (I asked the same
question one month ago, check fro the tread about "dell Power Edge
2950").

Olivier

> Make sure that you get a Revision 2 (R2).  We had some serious stability 
> issues with two R1s.  Yay for beta testing $6k servers.
> 
> You'll want to read the entire thread about mfi(4) and bce(4) instability 
> on RELENG_6.  Someone just reported a geometry size reporting error with 
> the new PERC/6 that Dell is pushing, so stick with PERC/5.
> 
> My personal recommendation is to use em(4) and disable onboard Broadcom 
> and forget that Dell ever started shipping Broadcom.
> 
> ~BAS

> > As stupid as this is going to sound, I solved my dump problem on one of
> > my 2950s running amd64 7.0 with two dual core processors.
> > 
> > The problem was when I did a level 0 dump, regardless of partition. At
> > random times the dump would halt, never to resume. Restarting the dump
> > was a hit-and-miss as to whether it would succeed. Eventually the dump
> > would succeed but it might tape 20 attempts to dump /var, for example.
> > 
> > The problem was solved this stupid way:
> > 
> > Have some other disk activity on the dumping partition. For example, if
> > I am dumping /var I repeatedly execute this command: ls -lR /var
> > > /dev/null
> > 
> Did you disable the "randomly schedule a RAID parity check of random 
> sectors" feature in the PERC5 BIOS?