FreeBSD 7.0 Installation with 8GB of RAM
I was installing a server for a client earlier today which had four 2GB RAM sticks in totalling 8GB of RAM. Bizarrely when trying to boot it, either via PXE or CD, irrespective of ACPI being disabled it would hang at
/stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0
when ACPI was enabled and at
Trying to mount root ufs:/dev/md0
with ACPI disabled. The latter case was worse as it would require an APC reboot rather than just a three fingered salute.
After tying a few other combinations unsuccessfully I finally wondered if the RAM might might be an issue. Not the sticks themselves but rather the quantity of it. The boot loader and installer are after all 32-bit and not 64-bit. So I opened up the server, pulled out 3 of the RAM sticks and tried again…
Success
So it would seem that the sysinstall program can’t quite cope with very large quantities of RAM when installing. The solution is to install with a smaller quantity of RAM and then upgrade the server once its running.
