Which install ?

[Michael Powell]

Darryl Hoar wrote:

[snip]
>> 
>> After looking at the referenced wiki and my system, I believe I have a
>> supermicro
>> SuperServer 6012L-6.  It has (2) Xeon 512K L2 "Prestonia" processors. 
>> They are
>> Installed in a P4DLR+ motherboard which has 603 pin sockets.
 
> From this, I believe I should install the i386 version of Freebsd.  Do I
> have to  do anything to enable multi-processors in Freebsd ?

Yes - the Prestonia is from before EMT64.
 
Some while back FreeBSD went to having SMP enabled as default in the GENERIC 
kernel. I haven't looked at the 6.x series as I went to 7.0-Release when it 
arrived. I did take a quick look at the GENERIC conf file on a 7.1-Release 
box and it has SMP in there as default.

On older hardware you might try both/either 6.x and/or 7.1 releases and try 
and see if one works better. I'd try 7.1 first as it will have a better long 
term upgrade path, and fall back to giving 6.x a go if 7.1 gives trouble.

Most likely what you'll see is whether or not the disk controllers are 
properly supported. SCSI and/or IDE can give problems with boot ordering 
sometimes. If it doesn't hickup on the disk controller(s) everything else 
will most likely be fine. As old as it is there is a pretty fair chance it 
will be OK. 

-Mike