Re: Some problems moving to new hardware with NetBSD-8/i386

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 05:55:11AM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> [...]
> 
> It's an MSI H110M Gaming motherboard, Micron 4gig DDR4 memory stick,
> and Intel Celeron dual core G3930 Kaby Lake CPU. I haven't used Intel
> stuff for a long time, it was AMD for years.

kaby lake isn't well supported yet. I have this in a laptop.

> 
> I'm having enough problems trying to upgrade my old i386 server
> machine such that I'm hoping someone can tell me "Just by this
> motherboard/memory/cpu" or even some pre-built machine. I want to
> upgrade to amd64 (x86_64) at some point, and I will do that if it will
> solve some of these problems.
> 
> Problems:
> 
> 1. Memory is not detected as 4GB:
> 
> NetBSD 8.0_BETA (GENERIC.201711131530Z)
> total memory = 2209 MB
> avail memory = 2153 MB
> 
> The motherboard's BIOS reports 4096 MB of memory.

If you're using an i386 kernel this is expected. You'll need an i386 PAE
kernel, or amd64.

> 
> 2. I can't boot the machine reliably without interrupting the
> bootloader and doing this:
> 
> boot -1 -2 (disable SMP, disable ACPI)
> (I can't figure out how to disable ACPI in the BIOS, but I can disable SMP)
> 
> Can someone recommend a kernel config that might be more stable?
> 
> -current doesn't seem to be significantly different. I still have to
> boot with -1 -2 to make it stable.

This is strange, I didn't notice such problems with amd64 on my kaby lake
system, but I'm running amd64. It would be interesting to see if
amd64 is better on your hardware.

> 3. Some hardware is not supported on the motherboard, but the one that
> hurts the most is the ethernet adapter:
> 
> # dmesg | grep ^vendor
> vendor 8086 product 1911 (miscellaneous system) at pci0 dev 8 function
> 0 not configured
> vendor 8086 product a131 (miscellaneous DASP, revision 0x31) at pci0
> dev 20 function 2 not configured
> vendor 8086 product a13a (miscellaneous communications, revision 0x31)
> at pci0 dev 22 function 0 not configured
> vendor 8086 product a121 (miscellaneous memory, revision 0x31) at pci0
> dev 31 function 2 not configured
> vendor 8086 product 15b8 (ethernet network, revision 0x31) at pci0 dev
> 31 function 6 not configured

This is an I219 ethernet. There is some code in wm(4) but it's disabled.
I tried it but couldn't get it to work (there seems to be some quirks in
the hardware, for which we may not have all the workaround yet).

> 
> 4. My wm based gigabit ethernet adapter has performance problems, I
> was told about this in another thread. So I'm using a USB cdce one for
> now. Seems to work fine. I'd rather use a PCI-E card. Can someone
> recommend one?

wm(4) should work. Maybe you have interrupt problems, probably related
to the fact that you disable ACPI. If this is the case, other add-on
adapters might have the same problem.

> 
> 5. It "feels" generally slow. Slower than my 8 or so year old AMD
> system with 1 gig of memory. But I'm not sure if this is real.

Is it with X11, or a more general problem ? we don't have support for
the kabylake graphics and default to the generic VESA driver, that
may explain it.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--