On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:

> > I have a number of older Compaq Proliant boxes.  These are p90s, and have
> > a large compliment of nonstandard (non APIC stuff IIRC) components to
> > support SMP (not to mention that standard pentiums don't support it "in
> > house" either)...  
> 
> Have you tried booting an SMP kernel on them yet?  Are you sure they
> don't work?  (the MP spec goes back to covering multiprocessor 486
> boxes).

I tried one a while ago, before the era of stability, I believe.  It would
be smart to try a recent one, I guess ;-)

I'll give it a try once ad@netbsd.org and I have straightened out using
the cac device on EISA.  Then at least I have a disk to boot from ;-)

> > If we had the proper source, dedication, etc... would it theoretically be
> > possible to add different ways of spinning up/talking between CPUs?  Or
> > are we tied into the standard Intel specs?
> 
> It should be possible to restructure the code that way (and, indeed,
> in the fullness of time, I'm planning on adding that sort of thing for
> MP BIOS vs. ACPI), but it's hard to sensibly add hooks to allow that
> sort of variance without having hardware docs to know exactly how
> things vary.

Cool.

I'll try a newer MP kernel and let you know the dmesg.

Thanks 10e6!

-Jon
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