new toys ...

[Peter Van Epp]

> 
> On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Peter Van Epp wrote:
> 
> > 	Looks like there should be some interesting testing coming up. I have
> > aquired a pair of dual Athelon machines (although FreeBSD only wants to use
> > one CPU at the moment) and 4 Sysconnect Gig cards. The netpipe benchmark gets
> > around 700 Mbps from them and I just tried a 25 meg tcpdump file on tcpreplay
> > and it believes it managed to get ~668 Mbps on to the fibre. Now to set up 
> > a test situation where argus can be made to listen to that traffic as it goes
> > by ... Somewhat suprisingly, FreeBSD appears to be more efficient than Linux
> > (%30 CPU at speed against %50 for Linux, but Linux will use both CPUs which
> > FreeBSD currently won't) but linux response is more linear with changing block 
> > sizes. 
> 
> FreeBSD will work with 2 CPUs, you just have to change the kernel
> config file and recompile the kernel.
> 
> Winfred
> 

	Been there done that. There is a bug in the Athelons around APIC I/O
however. One box works SMP the other doesn't. Opinion on the SMP list is that
this may be the bug (especially since Linux which has a fix does work on both
boxes fine). We are currently checking with AMD to see if the bug is fixed in
this rev of the CPU and I actually have a hardware problem (which is still a
possibility) on one box. While that happens I'm happily poking at benchmarks
to see what it will do and whats best (Linux channel bonding for FDX for 
instance).

Peter Van Epp / Operations and Technical Support 
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada