FreeBSD 10 install with 2 TB RAM: system hangs

R

reinhard

Hello!

I've just tried to install FreeBSD 10-RELEASE on a Dell PowerEdge R910 server with 2TeraBytes 2 terabytes of RAM and four ten-core CPUs. The boot menu was shown but after "Booting" the system hangs to reset.

Is FreeBSD installable on this hardware?
 
Re: FreBSD 10 install with 2 TB RAM: system hangs

Verbose booting shows these messages:
Code: 
Booting...
SMAP type=01 base=0000000000000000 len=000000000009e000
SMAP type=01 base=0000000001000000 len=000000007f238000
SMAP type=02 base=000000007f338000 len=0000000000160000
SMAP type=03 base=000000007f34e000 len=00000000007f0000
SMAP type=02 base=000000007f3cd000 len=0000000000c33000
SMAP type=02 base=0000000080000000 len=0000000010000000
SMAP type=02 base=00000000fe000000 len=0000000002000000
SMAP type=01 base=0000000100000000 len=000001ff80000000

After these messages the system hangs.
 
Re: FreBSD 10 install with 2 TB RAM: system hangs

reinhard said:
Boot menu was shown but after "Booting" system hangs to reset.

Is FreeBSD installable on this hardware?
Click to expand...
It doesn't hang. It just takes a very long time because you have a lot of memory.
 
That sounds reasonable, it takes some time to initialize that amount of data structures to keep track of 2 TB worth of pages.

Edit: also keep in mind that this is to be done in very early startup with no SMP available, so one core has to walk over all these page tables and get them in line before virtual memory can be enabled.
 
Crivens said:
That sounds reasonable, it takes some time to initialize that amount of data structures to keep track of 2TB worth of pages.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's doing something but I have no idea what. It does indeed appear that the machine just hangs but it isn't, it does boot after some time. I never noticed the delay at home until I did a project for a company that had servers with 32 GB of memory. It took a massive amount of time before they actually started booting. I can only imagine how long it'll take with 2 TB :PP
 
Maybe that would be an interesting thing to do, to split up those data structures and set them up more on demand, partition for memory slots - so you can "unmount" some faulty RAM when needed.
 
Yes, it loads after more than 20 minutes of waiting. But it isn't normal. Linux (Debian 7) loads much faster.
 
reinhard said:
Yes, it loads after more than 20 minutes of waiting. But it isn't normal.
Click to expand...

Try setting in /boot/loader.conf:
Code: 
hw.memtest.tests="0"

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/r ... ailed.html
[amd64, i386, pc98] A loader(8) tunable hw.memtest.tests has been added. This controls whether to perform memory testing at boot time or not. The default value is 1 (perform a memory test).[r224516]
Click to expand...

reinhard said:
Linux (Debian 7) loads much faster.
Click to expand...

These aren't the operating systems you're looking for. ;)
 
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