Can FreeBSD be installed on DellPowerEdge2800 ?

[Scott Long]

David Sze wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 08:25:40AM -0600, Art Mason wrote:
> 
>>Vinny Abello wrote:
>>
>>>At 05:50 PM 3/1/2005, Art Mason wrote:
>>>
>>>>Indeed, just installed on a customer's server last night, and I build 
>>>>SMP support into the GENERIC kernel this morning.  Only issues I 
>>>>encountered has to do w/ recognizing the full 4GB of RAM, but this 
>>>>apparently has some compatibility issues w/ the amr driver.
>>>>As per Holger's comments about disabling USB in BIOS, this is a good 
>>>>suggestion, since the DRAC apparently causes some IRQ issues w/ the 
>>>>PS/2 keyboard controller, or something along those lines.  Regardless, 
>>>>these 2850 boxes are stupid fast, and I'm looking forward to 
>>>>benchmarking 5.3 on them.
>>>
>>>
>>>FYI, the architecture of the 2850 (assuming it is similar to your 2800) 
>>>requires that you enable PAE support in your kernel of whatever OS you 
>>>run to address the full 4GB of RAM. This is due in some part because of 
>>>the memory mapping that was done for the PCI express bus and/or onboard 
>>>Perc controller (per Dell tech support). We've run into this with all of 
>>>our 2850's with various OS's and enabling PAE (per Dell's advice) fixes it.
>>
>>
>>Yeah, I cam across that on some mailing list archives, but saw some 
>>additional references that this can cause issues with the amr driver. 
>>Have you experienced any instability issues with the amr driver and PAE 
>>enabled?  If not, then I'll give this a shot on one of our lab boxes for 
>>testing.  Thanks for the suggestion, BTW.
> 
> 
> 
> On my 2850 the upper 1GB of RAM cannot be addressed without PAE support
> in the kernel.  However, amr in 4.11-RELEASE does indeed seem to have
> trouble with PAE.  The result being that with the option in the kernel,
> the root device (ufs:/dev/amrd0s1a) cannot be found.
> 
> I backported scottl's amr PAE fixes from RELENG_5; the diffs applied
> cleanly (with offsets).  I'm happy to report that my 2850 can now
> address its full 4GB and see its amr volumes.
> 
> The diff against 4.11-RELEASE is attached, hopefully someone will be
> willing to commit it to RELENG_4.
> 

I don't have the cycles to watch after RELENG_4, so I'll have to take
your word that this works.  What date is this patch against?  I
committed some follow-up fixes last week that are required for
management apps to work (and yes, LSI is getting ready to support
FreeBSD with management apps).

Scott