FreeBSD 9-Stable + Atom D510 Freeze

[Thomas Laus]

> Tom,
> I have had multiple D510's and now D525's that are part of my test
> systems, all are 4GB machines and all run the latest (ie 2 days old) 9.X
> Stable.  They're faultless.  I have a D510 in production serving 30
> users - yes its a 1G system running, sendmail, squid, samba as PDC. 
> It's been in place for at least 7 months and runs without any hiccups.
> 
> Though I would point out that the Atom processor does NOT do out of
> order processing, so a VIA motherboard that is of lower GHz builds
> worlds/ports in less time that a supposedly faster Atom. 
> 
> Your question re HT, yes HT introduces some additional latency, but is
> unlikely to be the problem.
>
Thanks for the information about the HT CPU's.  I asked the question to the 
group because I did not know if they were functionally any different than a 
traditional CPU.  I successfully built my problem port, Tshark, yesterday 
while monitoring 'top' on another console.  I observed that all 4 cpu's were 
in service for the build and at times were running at 100 percent each.  The 
State column on all 4 occasionally showed a 'pfault' on all 4 but recovered 
and the build continued to successful completion.
 
> When I experience something like spurious reboots and it is definately
> not hardware, then I delete /usr/src and /usr/ports and perform a
> complete rebuild.  (Yes seriously, and on the Atom's we're talking days,
> aren't we :)  )
>
I have been using this Atom D510 since it was released about 3 years ago.  It 
ran on FreeBSD 8-Stable until about a month ago.  I installed an Intel 520 
SSD and loaded a fresh copy of a FreeBSD 9 Snapshot.  After getting the 
source and ports tarballs, I used svnup to bring both up to date.  I built 
and installed world and the kernel to bring me up to Stable.  I rebuilt all 
of my ports using Portmaster.

The spurious reboot issue existed for the last 3 years when running FreeBSD-8 
Stable.  I never had the problem building world or kernel.  It only occurred 
when building some ports.  Subversion and Tshark more often than others.  
FreeBSD 9-Stable was frozen when I tried to build tshark, but I was able to 
build it OK yesterday.  Everything hardware related other than the Atom 
microprocessor and the Intel motherboard itself is new.  The OS is now a 
different version and all of the source was rebuilt monthly.  The ports have 
been been built many times in the last 3 years.

Tom

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