latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors are buggy as hell

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2007 at 05:42:23PM +0300, Andrei Kolu wrote:
> According to Theo de Raadth http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631 
> latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors are buggy as hell. What counter-measures 
> are taken within FreeBSD community?

I voiced similar concerns on a tech forum back when the C2Ds were
released, going purely off of the Errata.  As it turned out, most of
the entries I had concerns about were either 1) addressed by future
processor steppings, 2) microcode updates, or 3) were not causing issues
in present-day operating systems.

The bottom line is that every processor - Intel, AMD, VIA (god forbid),
Transmeta, Cyrix (back in the day), blah blah blah - has bugs.  The
manus know this when they come out, which is why most of them provide
errata.

This isn't to say Theo has a point (he does), but he's borderline rabid
when it comes to stuff like this.  It's just how he is as a person.  As
long as you're aware of his personality type, it's then easy to conclude
that he's focusing on the right stuff, but over-dramatising it.

That said, two of our production servers use C2Ds (one 6600, one 6420)
and neither of them have any issues (especially the one using the 6420,
which is a heavily-loaded MySQL box) using RELENG_6.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |