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I recently got an IBM eserver xseries 226 from somebody, they only do HP in that shop, and it was a leftover from a takeover they did a little while back. Since he wasn’t going to use it, he gave it to me. Thanks a lot buddy!

After some investigation, I found out it had the following specs:

• 512MB DDR2 ECC (pc-3200)
• 3x 146GB SCSI320 hard disks (raid-5 configuration)
• a XEON CPU (it has one, but room for two)
• gigabit Ethernet (broadcom chip)
• PCI-E and PCI-X slots
• An IBM Raid controller with battery backed cache.

Okay, since I wanted to install FreeBSD on it, I immediately downloaded 6.2, and installed it. But right after that, I was wondering, is this a XEON that does EM64T (or as intel likes to call it now: intel64)? It wasn’t easy to find out. IBM sells these boxes with both a normal 3.0 GHz and a 3.0GHz that does EM64T. Normaly, I would just check what FreeBSD writes in /var/run/dmesg.boot. It said the following:

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz (3000.12-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = “GenuineIntel”  Id = 0xf34  Stepping = 4  Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
Features2=0x641d<SSE3,RSVD2,MON,DS_CPL,CNXT-ID,CX16,xTPR>
AMD Features=0×20000000<LM>
Logical CPUs per core: 2

Mmm, no sign of anything 64-bit there. But that line with AMD features did turn me a little suspicious.
A little asking around on #fifo didn’t yield any results either, but then I found a cute little tool called cpuid in /usr/ports/misc/cpuid. And guess what that one came up with:

Extended feature flags: 20000000:
EM64T Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology

So yay! I got myself a 64-bit capable XEON (now to reinstall the box with the amd64 version of FreeBSD).

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FreeBSD

Okay, at work we have a vmware virtual infrastructure (or vmware esx 3.x) setup. It’s a really sweet setup, made up out of four boxes (HP DL385′s) with two dual-core AMD Opteron CPU’s, 16GB of RAM, and a nice 6TB SAN for storage. There’s a windows DL380 for virtual centre, and to manage the snapshots ( ESX Ranger Pro) and Backups, also we have a tape robot hanging around in one of the cabinets for the tape backups.

One thing I didn’t like about this however, was that FreeBSD didn’t run on it. The kernel simply did not recognise the hard disk vmware created for this virtual machine.

Enter FreeBSD 6.2-RC2

Yay! It works! There’s one little snag when installing with the boot-only ISO from FreeBSD, for some reason it doesn’t put the lnc0 network interface in UP mode. (no matter what you try). However, if you install it with disk 1 of the full install set, it works like a charm. I’ve had it running under load for a couple of days now, and I see no problems whatsoever.

For the time being I’m using it to toy around with Cacti perhaps I’ll be able to convince the rest to start using that instead of what we use now. With some luck, I’ll be able to convince them of FreeBSD while I am at it.

FreeBSD FreeBSD, virtualisation, Vmware