Re: desktop dominance

[Frank Shute]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:28:15PM -0400, Benjamin Cance wrote:
>
> I have had Linux for a long time. I have a different desktop coming that 
> I am eager to play with FreeBSD on. It is a dual processored Intel Xeon 
> @ 3.2ghz (64-bit). How are HP workstations with FreeBSD?

Check that it is advertised to work with unix/linux and not just
Vista.

I bought a cheap workstation from HP with a crappy BIOS.

The result is that I can only boot it with ACPI disabled and hence am
only able to run 1 core of it's AMD dual core 3800+ under FreeBSD.

It's running 6.3-RELEASE, so if I upgraded it to 7.0 I might have
better luck.

Not a total disaster: I use it as a low power mail and webserver and I
subsequently built my own workstation but nothing as high-end as
you're looking at.

I believe, a lot of people on this list run FreeBSD on the HP 1u/2u
servers with good results though.

-- 

 Frank 


 Contact info: http://www.shute.org.uk/misc/contact.html 

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Re: desktop dominance

[Jerry McAllister]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:28:15PM -0400, Benjamin Cance wrote:

> I have had Linux for a long time. I have a different desktop coming that 
> I am eager to play with FreeBSD on. It is a dual processored Intel Xeon 
> @ 3.2ghz (64-bit). How are HP workstations with FreeBSD?

Just fine.I have run several.
Just make sure the video and NIC cards are supported.
The rest of everything should not be in question.

jerry

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RE: desktop dominance

[Jim Stapleton]

> I have had Linux for a long time. I have a different desktop coming
> that I am eager to play with FreeBSD on. It is a dual processored
> Intel Xeon @ 3.2ghz (64-bit). How are HP workstations with FreeBSD?


As already said by another user, most things won't be too bad, but
vendors use a lot of different hardware. The things I'd recommend.

1) Read the handbook, like every other piece of documentation, it's
not all-encompasing, but it's one of the best I've seen.
2) In my experience, you are most likely to run into "interesting
quirks" with sound, pcmcia/pccard, and USB/Firewire, in that order.
I've not used raid. Most other things seem to work fairly well
out-of-the-box. These all may take some set up and manual install.

In the release notes, you can find hardware compatibility information,
but it does not seem to be all inclusive - it's more of a "if it's
here, it will/wont work as described, if it's not, your mileage may
vary". I would take whatever OS it comes installed with, and get the
chipset information on the following out of the driver/device
configurations, if you don't know initially, or can't get them
elsewhere:


1) Video
2) Sound
3) Network
4) USB controller
5) SCSI/ATA/RAID controllers (unlikely to cause issues in my
experience, but certainly not unheard of)
6) North/South bridge (unlikely to cause issue, but better safe than sorry)
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Re: desktop dominance

[Darren Spruell]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 7:28 PM, Benjamin Cance
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have had Linux for a long time. I have a different desktop coming that
>  I am eager to play with FreeBSD on. It is a dual processored Intel Xeon
>  @ 3.2ghz (64-bit). How are HP workstations with FreeBSD?

Given the range of hardware combinations possible in a given vendor,
that's a painful question to try to answer. Generally speaking, you'll
probably have no problems, but it's a matter of the individual
components and their respective level of support. Find out details (as
in, __details__, like exact chipset used where possible) about the
various parts in your workstation and you can reference resources like
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.3R/hardware-amd64.html or
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/hardware.html (or the list
archives, or ...) for information about them.

On a 64-bit platform you may notice issues with older drivers (which
you probably don't have) or more likely some third-party packages that
aren't quite 64-bit clean.

I've had a very successful experience with FreeBSD on the last two
modern high-end workstations I've run it on; my only problem has not
been with FreeBSD but with the binary blob NVIDIA driver on a Quadro
FX 3450/4000 SDI. Outside of that, everything has been stellar.


Copyright (c) 1992-2008 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE #0: Mon Mar 17 18:04:24 MST 2008
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU   E5345  @ 2.33GHz (2327.51-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x6f7  Stepping = 7
  
Features=0xbfebfbff
  Features2=0x4e3bd
  AMD Features=0x2010
  AMD Features2=0x1
  Cores per package: 4
real memory  = 3219169280 (3070 MB)
avail memory = 3136241664 (2990 MB)
ACPI APIC Table: 
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 8 CPUs
 cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  0
 cpu1 (AP): APIC ID:  1
 cpu2 (AP): APIC ID:  2
 cpu3 (AP): APIC ID:  3
 cpu4 (AP): APIC ID:  4
 cpu5 (AP): APIC ID:  5
 cpu6 (AP): APIC ID:  6
 cpu7 (AP): APIC ID:  7
ioapic0: Changing APIC ID to 8
ioapic1: Changing APIC ID to 9
ioapic0  irqs 0-23 on motherboard
ioapic1  irqs 24-47 on motherboard
kbd1 at kbdmux0
netsmb_dev: loaded
ath_hal: 0.9.20.3 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
acpi0:  on motherboard
acpi0: [ITHREAD]
acpi0: Power Button (fixed)
Timecounter "ACPI-fast" frequency 3579545 Hz quality 1000
acpi_timer0: <24-bit timer at 3.579545MHz> port 0x808-0x80b on acpi0
acpi_hpet0:  iomem 0xfed0-0xfed003ff on acpi0
Timecounter "HPET" frequency 14318180 Hz quality 900
cpu0:  on acpi0
est0:  on cpu0
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est0 attach returned 6
p4tcc0:  on cpu0
cpu1:  on acpi0
est1:  on cpu1
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est1 attach returned 6
p4tcc1:  on cpu1
cpu2:  on acpi0
est2:  on cpu2
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est2 attach returned 6
p4tcc2:  on cpu2
cpu3:  on acpi0
est3:  on cpu3
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est3 attach returned 6
p4tcc3:  on cpu3
cpu4:  on acpi0
est4:  on cpu4
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est4 attach returned 6
p4tcc4:  on cpu4
cpu5:  on acpi0
est5:  on cpu5
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est5 attach returned 6
p4tcc5:  on cpu5
cpu6:  on acpi0
est6:  on cpu6
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est6 attach returned 6
p4tcc6:  on cpu6
cpu7:  on acpi0
est7:  on cpu7
est: CPU supports Enhanced Speedstep, but is not recognized.
est: cpu_vendor GenuineIntel, msr 721072106000721
device_attach: est7 attach returned 6
p4tcc7:  on cpu7
acpi_button0:  on acpi0
pcib0:  port 0xcf8-0xcff on acpi0
pci0:  on pcib0
pcib1:  at device 2.0 on pci0
pci1:  on pcib1
pcib2:  irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci1
pci2:  on pcib2
pcib3:  irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci2
pci3:  on pcib3
pcib4:  irq 16 at device 1.0 on pci2
pci4:  on pcib4
pcib5:  at device 0.3 on pci1
pci5:  on pcib5
fwohci0:  mem 0xdceff000-0xdcef irq 26 at device
5.0 on pci5
fwohci0: [FILTER]
fwohci0: OHCI version 1.0 (ROM=1)
fwohci0: No. of Isochronous channels is 8.
fwohci0: EUI64 00:00:d1:00:80:35:7a:57
fwohci0: Phy 1394a available S400, 3 ports.
fwohci0: Link S400, m