Re: Some problems moving to new hardware with NetBSD-8/i386

[mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst)]

acruhl%gmail.com@localhost (Andy Ruhl) writes:

>I'm having enough problems trying to upgrade my old i386 server
>machine such that I'm hoping someone can tell me "Just by this
>motherboard/memory/cpu" or even some pre-built machine. I want to
>upgrade to amd64 (x86_64) at some point, and I will do that if it will
>solve some of these problems.

Kaby Lake isn't exactly old.


>Problems:

>1. Memory is not detected as 4GB:

>NetBSD 8.0_BETA (GENERIC.201711131530Z)
>total memory = 2209 MB
>avail memory = 2153 MB

>The motherboard's BIOS reports 4096 MB of memory.

That's i386 limits, the other memory is mapped outside of the 32bit
address space. You either need the PAE kernel or go to 64bit.



>2. I can't boot the machine reliably without interrupting the
>bootloader and doing this:

>boot -1 -2 (disable SMP, disable ACPI)
>(I can't figure out how to disable ACPI in the BIOS, but I can disable SMP)

What happens with SMP and ACPI ?



>3. Some hardware is not supported on the motherboard, but the one that
>hurts the most is the ethernet adapter:

>vendor 8086 product 15b8 (ethernet network, revision 0x31) at pci0 dev
>31 function 6 not configured

I219v2 Controller. That would be the wm driver, but it doesn't support I219 yet.


>4. My wm based gigabit ethernet adapter has performance problems, I
>was told about this in another thread. So I'm using a USB cdce one for
>now. Seems to work fine. I'd rather use a PCI-E card. Can someone
>recommend one?

I'm using a couple of simple wm based cards. Last one was "Intel Gigabit
CT Desktop Adapter", e.g. https://www.amazon.de/dp/B001CY0P7G.


>5. It "feels" generally slow. Slower than my 8 or so year old AMD
>system with 1 gig of memory. But I'm not sure if this is real.

Not using ACPI might have some "interesting" effects. Check
vmstat -i and vmstat -e for rapdily occuring interrupts or events.


-- 
-- 
                                Michael van Elst
Internet: mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost
                                "A potential Snark may lurk in every tree."