Hi Jon!

> 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)...  These are nice machines, tho, and have lots of good
> stuff like excellent cooling, RAID (which Andy Doran has been working on -
> he seems to have gotten the cac device to run on EISA), and support for
> gobs of memory.

They're really nice!

> And their prices range from inexpensive to free.

If you get one for free, mail me :-)

> they do run things such as NT in SMP, and I believe Linux works on them
> in SMP as well.  I'm not too sure about FreeBSD.

Hmm.. That's a NetBSD Mailing List, but I'm more familiar with FreeBSD.
I have heard good things about that.
And just enable the following things in the kernel:

options	SMP
options APIC (If it is APIC Compliant)

If that doesn't work you can try out defining the number of CPUs bussess
IRQs,....
If it works, send me the dmesg output, please.

> 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?

I don't know. I just know that FreeBSD runs on Proliants with SMP. Don't
ask me which ones, but Compaq has them in their testdrive project
(testdrive.compaq.com)

HTH
-- 
Best Regards,
	Freddy

=====================================================================
Frederik Meerwaldt  ICQ: 83045387  Homepage: http://www.freddym.org
 Bavaria/Germany              OpenVMS and Unix Howtos and much more
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