The FreeBSD Diary

This article was originally finished on about Oct 18, but I never published it (for no particular reason). Although 6.0 has now been released, I thought I'd publish it now, just in case it helps.

The original article follows.

FreeBSD 6.0-RC1 came out on Oct 11. I started playing with it shortly thereafter. I've been running -current on my IBM ThinkPad T41 for some time.

A few days ago, I wrote about cross compiling on AMD64. Since then, I've swapped out that AMD 64 3000+ machine. In its place, and now acting as the gateway, is a Celeron 2.00 GHz with 280MB of RAM, running 4.11. All I did was move the HDD from the AMD to the Celeron. I also moved the ISP-facing NIC into the new box. That's so I'd present the same MAC address to the ISP and hopefully retain the same IP address (it worked; no IP address change for me).

The AMD box now contains a 3Ware 7006-2 card and two 80GB drives (one Seagate, one Maxtor). I planned to install 6.0RC1 onto this computer. I downloaded and burned the disc1 CD. The installation process kept freezing after displaying twed0. This also happened with a 5.4 CD but not with a 4.9 CD (and, I think, but can't recall precisely, with a 4.11 CD). The issue was definitely related to the 3Ware card, but the fault was not that of the card. It was the OS.

Darius suggested that I try this without ACPI. At the boot prompt, I issued a unset acpi_load to disable the ACPI module.

/boot.config: -DhConsoles: internal video/keyboard serial port
BIOS drive A: is disk0
BIOS drive C: is disk1
BIOS 639kB/1047232kB available memory

FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
(root@x64.samsco.home, Sun Oct 9 18:32:30 UTC 2005)
Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
/boot/kernel/kernel text=0x487f94 data=0x803e0+0x4ce28 syms=[0x4+0x614a0+0x4+0x77f33]

Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.
Booting [/boot/kernel/kernel] in 7 seconds...

Type '?' for a list of commands, 'help' for more detailed help.
OK unset acpi_load
OK boot
Copyright (c) 1992-2005 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 6.0-RC1 #0: Sun Oct 9 20:32:57 UTC 2005
root@x64.samsco.home:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
MPTable:
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ (1802.31-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = "AuthenticAMD" Id = 0x10ff0 Stepping = 0

OK boot -v
/boot/kernel/acpi.ko text=0x40c0c data=0x2160+0x1090 syms=[0x4+0x7810+0x4+0xa292]

hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

The full text of the boot -v console log, with ACPI enabled, can be found here.

The whole point of this article was to point out the problems I'm having now and provide an explanation as to why I haven't posted the results of my testing. In short, the tests worked. The solution is sound. I'll post details after I finish some disk testing. I'm comparing RAID-1, both hardware and software, on IDE and SATA drives. I'll also try gmirror as documented by Dru Lavigne in a recent OnLAMP article.

When I'm finished all that, and have decided upon a RAID-1 setup, I'll complete by cross compiling escapades.