# FBSD 5.3 & New Xeon CPUs / APIC IDs



## coleb (Oct 15, 2010)

I'm upgrading a system which now has 2 Xeon processors, each with 4 HTT cores for a total of 16 cores. This needs to run on FreeBSD 5.3 for reasons I won't get in to. 

The problem is that, the APIC IDs are: 0, 1, 2, 3, 18, 19, ... 52, 53. They're assigned in groups of 4. The first 4 cores show up ok, but the rest are ignored. I've started to go in and make changes to things like mptable.c::NAPICID, madt.c::NIOAPICS, etc. to simply up the number of APIC IDs supported but I'm not sure this is going to work in the end. I ended up with a panic pretty quick as a matter of fact.

My question is: Will FreeBSD 5.3 support non-sequential APIC IDs assuming the constants are adjusted to allow for them? I get the feeling that, for this version of the OS, having these APIC IDs non-sequential will cause problems. I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'd really appreciate any input on this. Thanks.


----------



## DutchDaemon (Oct 15, 2010)

If you say 'will FreeBSD 5.3 support', I hope you're not hoping on something that will be developed. FreeBSD 5.x is end-of-life. Dead and buried. No development whatsoever. Not even security patches. Something with a parrot.

If you mean 'will this work under FreeBSD 5.3', this is in the wrong forum


----------



## coleb (Oct 15, 2010)

Yeah, I'm aware that 5.3 is no longer supported. I am planning on doing the development which I figured would have been understood since I mentioned making changes to kernel files.

So, is this forum not for discussing driver / kernel development?


----------



## dennylin93 (Oct 15, 2010)

coleb said:
			
		

> Yeah, I'm aware that 5.3 is no longer supported. I am planning on doing the development which I figured would have been understood since I mentioned making changes to kernel files.
> 
> So, is this forum not for discussing driver / kernel development?



Yes, it is the right forum. However, it would probably be a better idea to discuss releases that are supported.


----------



## DutchDaemon (Oct 15, 2010)

Can't you run whatever's dictating FreeBSD 5 under a compat layer (COMPAT_FREEBSD5 in kernel, and misc/compat5x)? I don't think anyone will enter into a FreeBSD 5 development conversation, since most of the people here are admins/users. The developers are (for the most part) on the mailing lists.


----------



## coleb (Oct 15, 2010)

Thanks for the replies. We've heavily modified the 5.3 kernel itself, which is why I'm stuck using it until we can spend the time to update our system. It's very difficult to work with obviously since it is so old and, as you've pointed out, people don't typically want to discuss such an old environment. Thanks.


----------

