FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?

[Rutger Bevaart]

It seems that updating our machine to 5.4-p5 (RELEND_5_4) has solved this,
or at least made it occur less frequently. Our last reboot was after
building and installing the new kernel and it hasn't gone down since. This
is with SMP, ACPI and HT enabled on a Dell 1750 with two 3GHz Xeons. The
2850 has been rock-stable running 5.4-p3. Whatever is was, it seems to
have been fixed around that time.

Could be that your issues are amd64 related. We run the i386 branch
because we need stable systems, not 64bit.

The issue still persists on 4.11 though. Can somebody explain what the
ACPI fixes were around that time and if they will be backported to 4.X?

Regards
Rutger Bevaart

On Thu, August 18, 2005 1:55, Palle Girgensohn said:
>
>
> --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
>
>


Rutger Bevaart :: illian.networks