TheRaven64's Journal: SMP is Fun!

Well, my SMP box arrived. It turned out to be an Electronics for Imaging Fiery EX2000 (The eBay description wasn't very good, which explains why no one else bid on it). FreeBSD 4.8 seems to like dual CPUs, although I expect I will get a performance boost when I upgrade to 5-STABLE (September, hopefully) which has finer grained locking in the kernel.

The box came with 4 full length PCI cards I have been unable to identify, as well as an LCD display on the front, with a PCI controller. At some point I will see if there is any documentation available for it and, if so, write some control software for it.

The only headache so far is that I had planned to put my second hard drive in the machine (the one on which I store my music, as well as the collection of drivers, updates and utils I've downloaded). Unfortunately the machine tries to boot from IDE before it boots SCSI, and when it fails to boot from the IDE disk it fails and gives up. Usually this would be trivial to fix, but the machine displays a splash-screen on boot, and I have no idea how to enter the BIOS. Any suggestions would be welcome... If all else fails I'll have to install a bootloader on the second disk pointing at the first one. It would work, but it would be an ugly solution.