FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?

[Lucas Holt]

I can't speak for that config or network card, but I had a similar  
experience with freebsd 5.2 and 5.3.  I got unusual errors  
occasionally for an rl nic and the machine randomly rebooted.   
Sometimes nothing was logged.  It turned out to be the network card.   
I replaced the NIC with a 3com 3c905c TX and the problem went away.

Its possible that the dell NICs are non standard and the driver isn't  
handling them well.  I've noticed problems with dell nics and  
standard drivers in their other products (lattitude d800, etc).  If  
you really thought it was an SMP issue, I suppose you could compile  
and run a non smp kernel as a test.

Its also possible that "4" processor smp isn't as reliable as 2.  I  
have read about scalability issues in the past with large numbers of  
cpus in freebsd.

On Jul 15, 2005, at 9:15 AM, Rutger Bevaart 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.
>
> Any clues or help greatly appreciated!
>
> Regards
> Rutger Bevaart
>
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Lucas Holt
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