FreeBSD 10-R 8 vCPU panics at boot under XenServer (on 8 'core' CPU)

[Karl Pielorz]

--On 24 February 2014 18:19:43 +0100 Roger Pau Monné 
<roger.pau at citrix.com> wrote:

> I've passed through a dual port BCE card (Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709)
> without problems. As a test, could you try to only pass the nic or the
> SAS controller to see if we can figure out if this is specific to one of
> the devices?

Ok, I tried several boots just passing through the LSI - all boots 
succeeded. There's quite a variance between how long it takes to 'launch' 
the CPU's. On a good run you'll get 'Netvsc initializing' small pause, then 
Launches 5 CPU's, another small pause - and the remaining 2 launch.

On a bad boot you'll get quite a long pause before the first launch, then a 
few more pop in - then a very long pause before the final one(s) launch.

I then changed to just passing through the NIC's - you get similar results 
- it's markedly slower than if nothing is passed through, but not so slow 
it fails.

It's only if you pass through the NIC's and the LSI - it's *really* slow - 
to the point that without upping the NUM_RETRIES in the patch you did it 
often panics (unable to schedule timer). Some of these boots can take 
minutes (but, shut down the VM and try it again and it'll complete 
"relatively quickly" - i.e. 20-30 seconds).

I can probably video some of the boots and give you a link off list to the 
footage (that'd probably give you a better idea of the timing involved).

I don't have the other machine running at the moment - so I can't do any 
testing of what performance you actually get from the passed through 
devices - they 'seem' to work ok from the limited testing I've done.

-Karl