Unable to install 8.x on a PowerEdge R810

[Sean Bruno]

On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 14:38 -0700, Mahlon E. Smith wrote:
> Picked up a couple of these powerhouse machines to be VirtualBox hosts.
> 24 core, 96G of RAM.  Trying to put (amd64) both 8.0-RELEASE and 8.1-RC2
> on it with no luck whatsoever so far. Any help provided would be greatly
> appreciated, I'm chomping at the bit pretty hard to put this hardware to
> use, and was fairly surprised that FreeBSD didn't work on it through the
> gate.
> 
> I've grabbed some screenshots from the DRAC, and dumped them here:
> 
>     http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/7234177/1/r810?h=f5fb1d
> 
> (sorry, I realize that's not -incredibly- helpful and partially
> truncated.  I'm currently limited to what I can screenshot, though I
> suppose I could boot via console and log it all... come to think of it,
> I'll go give that a try to get more comprehensive output.)
> 
> If I disable all the CPU options in the BIOS, I can get it to boot, but
> it hangs after mounting md0 (I never see the sysinstall screen.)  Same
> deal if I try booting in safe mode or without ACPI.
> 
> Otherwise, it spews errors for about 30 seconds so quickly I can't read
> them, then panics with a page fault in swapper.
> 
> I'm sure we'd like to get BSD installing reliably on such a beast, and
> I'm more than happy to play the guinea pig if someone would be willing
> to provide some direction with some things to try.  Help!  These are
> expensive paperweights!  :)
> 
> --
> Mahlon E. Smith  
> http://www.martini.nu/contact.html


Funny you should mention this box.  I've been arm wrestling with this
beastie for a couple of weeks and finally had some amount of success
today.

A couple of things:

1.  Reduce your RAM to 64G (seriously)
2.  Don't use the H200 Dell RAID controller.  It's not supported yet.
 -- Use the 6i or whatever the mfi(4) card is called.
3.  Don't compile in the ipmi(4) when you get the system up.
 -- I know there's an unpatched problem on 7 that is fixed in HEAD, but
    have no idea if its patched in 8
4.  Try doing serial console installs. 
 -- at the Beastie prompt, hit [6]. then at the OK prompt, type "set   
    console=comconsole"

Sean