On 9 Sep 2002 19:35:20 GMT, MLH wrote:
> I have a couple of MSI 6501 Dual AMD Athlon MP boxes here that
> appear to have the same hardware on them. I loaded the latest 1.6
> with today's i386mp_plus16_stable on both. Both come up fine with
> the latest 1.6 SP kernel, Both cpus come up fine with the MP kernel.
> However, there appears to be a problem with interrupt contention
> on one of the boxes and not the other. As far as I can tell, the
> bioses are set identically and are running the same kernel. Vendor
> claims they are identical, bought at the same time.
> 
> Questions :
> 
> Is there a significance to 
> mainbus0: Intel MP Specification (Version 1.1) (OEM00000 PROD00000000)
> vs.
> mainbus0: Intel MP Specification (Version 1.4) (OEM00000 PROD00000000)

Much thanks to all who replied.

Yes, MPS Version 1.4 is apparently required for 1.6 MP to work
properly, and yes, there was a bios setting to choose it that we
had missed.

The only problems I have had with these are that the LM driver
incorrectly calculates the cpu temperatures (port-i386/18205) and
XF86 appears to be somewhat unstable. It appears to simply lock up
the cpu it is running on - no core dump or anything. If XF86 locks
up cpu1, cpu0 can still conveniently restart the machine, but if
it is running on cpu0, the whole box appears to lock up. Is this
consistent with known status?

We will be primarily using these boxes as compute servers so XF86
shouldn't be a real problem, but wanted to try them out as desktops.
Pretty impressive, as long as X stays up :^)

Thanks again