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At Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:34:00 +0100 (CET),
Anders Hogrelius wrote:
>=20
>=20
> I'm getting to the point where I'm looking for a Tru64 SMP license to use=
=20
> instead of NetBSD as there seems to be to many bugs lurking within the SM=
P=20
> code of the NBSD kernel at the moment. They seem to be hard to find as=20
> some of them have been there quite long. Random hangs and panics seem to =

> be normal

I've been running various incarnations of the netbsd-1-6 branch on
several MP AlphaServers without too much trouble (albiet with most of
Michael's PMAP and locking patches), including on a 3-CPU 4100 w/2GB, a
2-CPU 264DP w/1GB, and a 4-CPU ES40 w/16GB.  Indeed there are some
occasional crashes due to MP locking bugs, but they're usually rare
enough to only be annoying.

I haven't tried 3.x, and at this point I won't -- I'll just jump to 4.x
and follow the netbsd-4 builds.  I've been running MP 4.x kernels on a
couple of i386 Xeon boxes without any problems, doing lots of builds
with source on NFS and with local disk and/or RAID controllers for the
build directories, running things like Firefox, emacs, etc.

> and unfortunately it seems to be the same with the SMP code of=20
> FreeBSD as well...

Last I looked FreeBSD wouldn't even support more than 2GB of RAM on Alpha.

> > On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Anders Hogrelius wrote:
> >
> >> I wonder if this fix might solve some of the problems I've had on my 2=
64DP
> >> which has 4Gb RAM. With a 3.1 SMP kernel it refused to see the drive=20
> >> connected to the IDE adapter... Where and how do I get and apply the f=
ix?

As for that, well my advice is to stay well and far away from the IDE
devices on Tsunami architecture machines such as the 264DP and ES series
if at all possible.

There were bad interactions between the IDE driver and the rest of the
system on the ES40 and we gave up and installed a SCSI CD-ROM instead,
though so far I haven't had major problems with the IDE CD-ROM on my
264DP, at least not under 1.6.x.  It only has 1GB of RAM though.

--=20
						Greg A. Woods

H:+1 416 218-0098 W:+1 416 489-5852 x122 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>       Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>

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