Dell Poweredge and lack of X2APIC support

S

ser22

Hi all,

I've noticed that some FreeBSD users use the Dell PowerEdge line despite the lack of support for Intel's X2APIC. Is the alleged improvement in overall system performance something negligible that can be disregarded when considering this hardware?

Just curious :-/
 
Performance is fine on Dell R430s and R640s that I use for Apache, MySQL and PHP, but YMMV - very much depends on your use case.

I don't know what X2APIC is, but haven't noticed its abscence. It might be there and working for all I know. Is it in regards to any particular PowerEdge generation?

I've got a Dell R450 to set up but only got as far as finding out that the RAID controller is no longer viewable under MEGACLI/STORCLI (there's a new PERCCLI tool that isn't available for FreeBSD) and that the 10G NIC drivers aren't quite right (that was under 13.1 or so; I need to go back and try with 14.0).

Netflix use and push performance on FreeBSD (but I don't think they use Dell PowerEdge).
 
ser22 said:
Is the alleged improvement in overall system performance something negligible that can be disregarded when considering this hardware?
Click to expand...

if the alleged performance isn't backed by benchmarks and hard empiricism; you can most likely disregard it. There's a lot of feature-fluff in modern CPUs for things that can be handled by the kernel. Especially for a real workloads. Gotta up pump up that marketing department. Intel doesn't make operating systems; so you gotta ask yourself is X feature is really beneficial or not.
 
Hey richardtoohey2, thanks for your feedback.

I believe it all boils down to whether having X2APIC disabled, effectively turns off the Hyperthreading on your R430-R640 as suggested here, or here, an issue that seems to go back to 2015.

I'm aware of the security implications of enabling SMT, but like you mentioned it all depends on the use case, and being able or not to use the Hyperthreading could be nice to know before considering the purchase of one of those Dell.

Brgds
 
Beastie7 said:
if the alleged performance isn't backed by benchmarks and hard empiricism; you can most likely disregard it. There's a lot of feature-fluff in modern CPUs for things that can be handled by the kernel. Especially for a real workloads. Gotta up pump up that marketing department. Intel doesn't make operating systems; so you gotta ask yourself is X feature is really beneficial or not.
Click to expand...
On my checklist SMT is a beneficial feature, so allegedly not being able to use it because of the lack of X2APIC support is an issue.
 
Only your use case can quantify whether it's beneficial or not. Intel support for FreeBSD is lacking nowadays unfortunately.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top