Re: Weird performance behaviour in 7.0

Richard Todd writes:
 > 
 > bruce_at_zuhause.mn.org writes:
 > > Richard Todd writes:
 > >  > This wouldn't by any chance be an Intel 965-chipset-based motherboard
 > >  > with 4G or more of memory, would it?  Because there's an interesting
 > >  > little bug in the BIOS on some of those boards which causes the
 > >  > cache-control registers to incorrectly declare a chunk of main memory
 > >  > as uncacheable.  This results in random slowdowns depending on whether
 > >  > your process lands in the "bad" zone of memory or not.  See 
 > >  > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.stable/50135/ for more details. 
 > >
 > > Bingo!  This is a Intel DG965WH with 4 GB of memory.  I don't think I
 > > can downgrade to the 1669 firmware because of the processor I'm
 > > using.  The Fedora thread says that there's a hack to do the following
 > > in linux to fix the "bad" zone

Embarrassingly, after I posted this, I realized that I was not at the
latest BIOS level, and not at a recommended level for my processor, so
I flashed it with the latest, version 1719.  Although in the Fedora
thread Jussit said that it didn't fix the problem, it seems to have
fixed it for me.  BTW, I was able to get the SMAP information at the
loader prompt.

I'm curious, though, should I be worried about the memcontrol list
entries that are listed as "set-by-firmware active bogus"?

Type '?' for a list of commands, 'help for wore detailed
OK smap
SMAP type=01 base=0000000000000000 len=000000000008f000
SMAP type=02 base=000000000008f000 len=0000000000011000
SMAP type=02 base=00000000000e0000 len=0000000000020000
SMAP type=01 base=0000000000100000 len=00000000cf461000
SMAP type=02 base=00000000cf561000 len=000000000000d000
SMAP type=0l base=00000000cf56e000 len=000000000009c000
SMAP type=04 base=00000000cf60a000 len=00000000000df000
SMAP type=01 base=00000000cf6e9000 len-0000000000009000
SMAP type=03 base=00000000cf6f2000 len=000000000000d000
SMAP type=01 base=00000000cf6ff000 len=0000000000001000
SMAP type=02 base=00000000cf700000 len=0000000000100000
SMAP type=02 base=00000000cf800000 len=0000000000800000
SMAP type=02 base=00000000fff00000 len=0000000000100000
SMAP type=01 base=0000000100000000 len=000000002c000000
OK
0x0/0x10000 BIOS write-back fixed-base fixed-length set-by-firmware active 
0x10000/0x10000 BIOS write-back fixed-base fixed-length set-by-firmware active 
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0x98000/0x4000 BIOS write-back fixed-base fixed-length set-by-firmware active 
0x9c000/0x4000 BIOS write-back fixed-base fixed-length set-by-firmware active 
0xa0000/0x4000 BIOS uncacheable fixed-base fixed-length set-by-firmware active 
0xa4000/0x4000 BIOS uncacheable fixed-base fixed-length set-by-firmware active 
0xa8000/0x4000 BIOS uncacheable fixed-base fixed-length set-by-firmware active 
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0x0/0xf080000000 BIOS write-back set-by-firmware active bogus 
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0xc0000000/0xf010000000 BIOS write-back set-by-firmware active bogus 
0xcf800000/0xf000800000 BIOS uncacheable set-by-firmware active bogus 
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