Hi, I am running a Dell R710 Poweredge Server with FreeBSD 10.3. Currently I have 48 GB of physical memory in the server. However I am getting the following, and it appears that not all of the memory is showing up correctly. In
dmesg I see the following:
Code:
real memory = 51539607552 (49152 MB)
avail memory = 1808547840 (1724 MB)
At first I thought maybe it was bad memory, but I have three other servers that are the same and they are all three showing the same issues.
That looks like you're running the i386 platform, not amd64. What does
# uname -m say? If it says "amd64", then we'll need to look at your
/boot/loader.conf file to see if you're doing anything that would gobble up a lot of memory. It is also possible for systems to report strange memory mapping (if you do a verbose kernel boot, the memory map is one of the first things output), but the R710 is a solid platform and I wouldn't expect to see any problems like this. I have a number of R710 systems happily running various FreeBSD with large amounts of installed memory.
I thought about updating the BIOS, however I am not sure how to update the BIOS since the update is for Windows. Dell does have a .BIN file for Linux, but I wasnt sure if I could use this to update on FreeBSD or not?
It won't run under FreeBSD's Linux compatibility - most firmware update things expect low-level features the Linuxulator doesn't provide.
However, you can create bootable discs and just boot and run the R710 update utility that way. I normally boot from the Dell CDU CD (it is obsolete - the latest version is
cdu_2.2_core_702.iso), but it is small, lightweight, and has a nice menu. You'll also need a SUU DVD, which is incredibly big and bloated, since it has updates for
everything. See my "
De-bloating the Dell Server Update Utility" series of blog posts for more info. Note that the latest SUU has been split into Windows and Linux versions, but
still doesn't fit on a double-layer DVD.
As an alternative, you can just download the "Update package for Linux" version of each of the firmware updates to a USB drive, boot the CDU and get a shell via F3, then run each update manually. The advantage of the SUU is that it will update everything, even hardware you didn't know you had.
