FreeBSD 7 on old SMP server?

[Joshua Coombs]

Oliver Fromme wrote:
> 
>  > My hacked up 386 showed gains going from 6.2 to 7, the big win that I've 
>  > noticed is scp throughput, I can sustain 40 to 45kbps where in the past 
>  > the box walled at around 30kbps.  Apache seems to have less latency 
>  > responding to gets also.  I'm just running a 7b3 kernel at the moment, 
>  > I'm going to have to repartition with a lot more swap space to be able 
>  > to build a 7 world (When did the ram use for a buildworld skyrocket?!) 
>  > but even with this setup, 7 + ULE is a win for me.
> 
> Are you saying you run FreeBSD 7 on an 80386(SX/DX) machine?
> How exactly did you hack it?  As far as I know, support for
> 80386 processors was removed from FreeBSD a while ago.

For a very short while with 6.0 I was tweaking the kernel to detect 386s 
as 486s, as well as using CPU_DISABLE_CMPXCHG and having ok luck.  I've 
now got a Cyrix 486DrX-2 66 installed in place of my Am386DX-40, which 
supports CMPXCHG as well as ID'ing as a 486 so I don't need to do any 
tweaking to stay running.

If I can get another viable 386DX box reassembled I'll see if 7 can be 
pressed into functioning on it as 6 could.

Joshua Coombs