4.9 SMP Stability?

[Morten A. Middelthon]

Hi,

I have been following this thread since I've been experiencing similar
problems with my dual P4 2.8GHz Xeon Dell PowerEdge 1750 server. Hopefully
my experiences will be useful to some of you.

I started with installing FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, then cvsup'ing and upgrading to
-p4 without problems. When I upgraded I also compiled in SMP-support into the
kernel. Then my problems started. The machine would panic and then reboot at
seemingly random intervals. After reading what some of the others on this list
did I first tried upgrading to 4.10-BETA, but that didn't help. I then
downgraded to 4.8-RELEASE-pXX (iirc), but no help there either (fortunately a
buildworld only takes about 20 minutes on this box ;)).
The next thing was to check BIOS and firmware versions, but they were all up
to date. 

Then I got a tip from a friend on IRC who told me to check my KVM settings in my
kernel. Out of old habit I have always defined NMBCLUSTERS, NSFBUFS and
similar options to specific values, overriding FreeBSD's own dynamic settings,
which are based on the amount of RAM. The machine in question has 2GB of RAM,
which is the highest amount of RAM in any FreeBSD server I've ever set up, so
the values for NMBCLUSTERS and so on I've used for servers with lower amounts
of RAM obviously didn't work for this setup. 

Now I let FreeBSD do this for me, that is setting maxusers to 0 and then
_not_ defining NMBCLUSTERS, NSFBUFS etc. So far the machine has been
completely stable. I've done one 'make -j4 buildworld', built several ports
and moved a large filesystem to it over NFS, and no problems. 

with regards,

-- 
Morten A. Middelthon

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
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