Alright... it's gonna take a while to get it processed and shipped here... it's around 105 lbs.  We'll see, thanks!

-----Original Message-----
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
Sent: Mar 13, 2005 3:50 AM
To: James Cornell <unixpenguin2004@earthlink.net>
Cc: port-i386@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: Welcome to port-i386

On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 07:33:36AM -0800, James Cornell wrote:
> Hello.  I'm new to the NetBSD port-i386 mailing list.  I just bought a machine to tinker with.  It's a Compaq Proliant 8500 with Quad 550MHz Intel Pentium 3 XEON processors (Expandable up to 8 processors), 1GB ram (Expandable to 16GB), and I was wondering a few things about SMP support with the i386 version of NetBSD.  I've used NetBSD in the past, I know how it works and what it works on at the general angle.  I was just wondering if the NetBSD 2.0 i386 port is mature enough to support oh say 8 550 XEONS with generally good stability and close to full performance capability.  SMP was just recently added to NetBSD so I really don't know how mature exactly it is.  Please leave me some feedback regarding the maturity of the 2.0 kernel and Quad and above systems on i386 hardware.

It depends on your usage. I have several dual-PIII SMP boxes running,
doing various tasks: release building, collecting statistics from network
swicthes via SNMP (mrtg and cricket), and www/ftp/sup/rsync/anoncvs server.
They're stable exept when running amanda backups (I have a workaround installed
which makes it not panic, but the root cause of the problem has not been
found yet). So I'd say just try it ... As you can see, although there is
one annoying bug, it's usable in a large pattern of applications.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--