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

[Andy Ruhl]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 6:24 AM, Manuel Bouyer  wrote:
>> 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?
>
> wm(4) should work. Maybe you have interrupt problems, probably related
> to the fact that you disable ACPI. If this is the case, other add-on
> adapters might have the same problem.

You're probably right. I built a new kernel with PAE enabled (no other
changes from GENERIC) and now the machine boots OK with smp and acpi.

The wm adapter works fine now as well.

Thanks.

Andy

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

[Andy Ruhl]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 8:19 AM,   wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 08:03:48AM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
>> But now it works fine. Don't know why.
>
> There are some problems with -current people are working on, they
> don't always trigger or for everyone. I think you hit one of them.
>
> http://gnats.netbsd.org/52676

Yeah, likely. This is NetBSD-8 though, so it seems to exist there as well.

Andy

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

[coypu]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 08:03:48AM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> But now it works fine. Don't know why.

There are some problems with -current people are working on, they
don't always trigger or for everyone. I think you hit one of them.

http://gnats.netbsd.org/52676

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

[Andy Ruhl]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:26 AM,   wrote:
> I assume these are the cause and effect, why do you need to disable SMP
> and ACPI?

You could be right. I build a kernel with PAE enabled from sources
from about the same time as the netbsd-8 level I installed.

I let it boot normally, and it boots fine.

I was having multiple problems with the machine not booting without
either -1, -2, or both in another thread.

Without -1 (disable smp) it would get to fsck and hang, and sometimes
panic if I used ctrl-c to break out of the hang.

Without -2 (disable acpi) it would hang at the last printf statement
in the kernel before init starts. Don't know why. -2 solved it. Maybe
this was not the real cause.

But now it works fine. Don't know why.

Andy

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

[maya]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 05:55:11AM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> boot -1 -2 (disable SMP, disable ACPI)
> 
> 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.

I assume these are the cause and effect, why do you need to disable SMP
and ACPI?

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

[Andy Ruhl]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 6:24 AM, Manuel Bouyer  wrote:
> Is it with X11, or a more general problem ? we don't have support for
> the kabylake graphics and default to the generic VESA driver, that
> may explain it.

Thanks for the education! This is why I use NetBSD.

I'm not using graphics, it's just a small headless server system.
Commands don't seem to run as quick as before for whatever reason.

I'm building a netbsd-8 PAE kernel now.

At some point I will try amd64. Not sure if it's possible to migrate
or if I will have to just rebuild it with a new root disk. I'll
research that.

Andy

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

[Manuel Bouyer]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 05:55:11AM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> [...]
> 
> It's an MSI H110M Gaming motherboard, Micron 4gig DDR4 memory stick,
> and Intel Celeron dual core G3930 Kaby Lake CPU. I haven't used Intel
> stuff for a long time, it was AMD for years.

kaby lake isn't well supported yet. I have this in a laptop.

> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.

If you're using an i386 kernel this is expected. You'll need an i386 PAE
kernel, or amd64.

> 
> 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)
> 
> Can someone recommend a kernel config that might be more stable?
> 
> -current doesn't seem to be significantly different. I still have to
> boot with -1 -2 to make it stable.

This is strange, I didn't notice such problems with amd64 on my kaby lake
system, but I'm running amd64. It would be interesting to see if
amd64 is better on your hardware.

> 3. Some hardware is not supported on the motherboard, but the one that
> hurts the most is the ethernet adapter:
> 
> # dmesg | grep ^vendor
> vendor 8086 product 1911 (miscellaneous system) at pci0 dev 8 function
> 0 not configured
> vendor 8086 product a131 (miscellaneous DASP, revision 0x31) at pci0
> dev 20 function 2 not configured
> vendor 8086 product a13a (miscellaneous communications, revision 0x31)
> at pci0 dev 22 function 0 not configured
> vendor 8086 product a121 (miscellaneous memory, revision 0x31) at pci0
> dev 31 function 2 not configured
> vendor 8086 product 15b8 (ethernet network, revision 0x31) at pci0 dev
> 31 function 6 not configured

This is an I219 ethernet. There is some code in wm(4) but it's disabled.
I tried it but couldn't get it to work (there seems to be some quirks in
the hardware, for which we may not have all the workaround 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?

wm(4) should work. Maybe you have interrupt problems, probably related
to the fact that you disable ACPI. If this is the case, other add-on
adapters might have the same problem.

> 
> 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.

Is it with X11, or a more general problem ? we don't have support for
the kabylake graphics and default to the generic VESA driver, that
may explain it.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer 
 NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--