Re: NetBSD/xen 9 motherboard recommendations

[Brad Spencer <brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost>]

Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric%snell-pym.org.uk@localhost> writes:

> It's time to upgrade my server hardware.
>
> I was a bit burnt when I tried to upgrade my current hardware to NetBSD 
> 9.0 back when it came out, as it turned out my SATA controllers didn't 
> work under Xen due to some change in the interrupt system; but now the 
> hardware is ageing, I want to make sure whatever I buy next will work 
> with the latest kernel :-)
>
> I don't think I can check this just by looking at the chipset support - 
> after all, my SATA chipset is fully supported by NetBSD 9 and works fine 
> under a GENERIC kernel, just not in Xen - so I'd be very glad if anybody 
> who's bought a server-class motherboard recently (with at least six SATA 
> ports, ideally eight, and maybe multiple gigabit NICs) and confirmed it 
> works with NetBSD/xen 9.3, could tell me what they bought :-)
>
> Thanks,


The answer will depend on your goals, needs and budget.  However, this
last week I went though a system change.

I had a need to replace a small Xen server as the hardware appears to
have developed a fault.  The original motherboard was a ASRock A320M-ITX
and I used a Ryzen 3 2200G Quad-Core 3.5Ghz CPU and used 16GB of non-ECC
memory.  This was a pretty nice small Xen server.  The I/O balance is
good and it performed well for its task.  The motherboard isn't a server
board, so no BMC and it does not support more than 4 SATA ports and the
disk controller may be a little quirky.

The AMD system was replaced with a AsRock Rack E3C246D2 motherboard and
a Intel Xeon E-2224 3.4Ghz.  I also changed memory and put in 32GB of
ECC memory.  This is a server type motherboard with a BMC, more NIC
ports and the ability to have up to 8 SATA drives if you use the OCULINK
port (you will have to get a cable for that).  I updated the firmware to
the latest for the BIOS and the BMC and both appear to work well.  The
remote management functions of the BMC work with NetBSD, including
artifical CD-ROM support.  The only thing about the BMC that didn't
appear to work was the BMC provides a cdce device and that errored with
a autoconfig error (setting alternative interface failed).  The ipmi
sensors showed up in envsys as expected.  The Java version of the remote
console crashed my Java JVM, but that may be the JVMs problem.  The
HTML5 remote console worked fine.

I think I will be happy enough with the replacement, although I do note
that the replacement uses more CPU in DOM0 when I/O is going on, so it
appears to be less balanced.  NetBSD 9.2_STABLE from 2022-06-16 or so
worked just fine with Xen 4.15.1 from pkgsrc 2022Q2.  A not so recent
-current (a 9.99.99 from July) paniced very early on in DOM0 somewhere
in the ACPI or PCI probe.  The replacement board only has USB ports and
no PS/2 and the keyboard was not functional yet, so looking at the
backtrace wasn't very possible.  I am building current version of
-current and am going to try that at some point.



-- 
Brad Spencer - brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org