FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?

[Palle Girgensohn]

--On fredag, juli 15, 2005 15.15.24 +0200 Rutger Bevaart 
<rutger.bevaart at illian.net> wrote:

>
> hello list,
>
> For the past year we've been running several Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers
> on FreeBSD 4.10, 4.11 and 5.3. All these machines have dual Xeons running
> with HT enabled. This install has proven to be unstable in that the
> machine will reboot between 3 days and 170 days without apparant reason.
> No log is written. Other machines we have with a single CPU (HT enabled)
> do not experience this problem.
>
> As it is present in both 4.x and 5.x and googling the last year has not
> revealed similar experience I'm consulting this list. As all of these
> machines are productions machines that have a continuous load (not heavly
> load, but a light average - some peaks) it's not easy to experiment with
> HT setting etc. I dislike driving to the datacenter for locked systems
> with fubarred kernels ;-)
>
> The only error i've ever seen just before a reboot is "bge0: discard frame
> w/o packet header" on the 5.3 machine.

Late comment while browsing the list for tips...

No good clues, I'm afraid, but we have a 2850, and it is far from stable, 
crashing within hours when running SMP, often but not always under high 
load. Single CPU works like a charm. This is very annoying, to say the 
least. See my posts on amd64@ around June 15.

FreeBSD 5.4p1 (amd64). Dell 2850 with dual Xeon CPUS, EM64T.

/Palle