FreeBSD on Sun Fire X2100 M2 and X2200 M2 servers

On Sun Fire X2100 M2 and X2200 M2 servers the eLOM (KVM) network access is established through an Ethernet port shared with the system.

In the FreeBSD Broadcom Ethernet driver (bge), ASF/IPMI has been disabled because it has been known to cause system lock-up problems on a small number of systems.

ASF (Alert Standard Format) and IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) is a technology used for system health monitoring and remote control.

It can be enabled by using a loader tunable, hw.bge.allow_asf.

If you are attempting to install FreeBSD on your server, it is crucial that you enable this loader setting before starting up the FreeBSD kernel.

If the setting has not been applied, you will lose access to your server. The only way to get it back online is for us to perform a local reboot of the server, which needs to be done by an on-site technician.

In the FreeBSD boot loader menu, choose option #6 to escape to the loader prompt.

Then type:

set hw.bge.allow_asf=1
boot

This should get you on to the installer, through KVM.

During installation, make sure you enable SSH and set up a user account.

When the installation has completed, you can reboot your server. Note that you will lose KVM access for now.

Log into your server through SSH and add the following line in your /boot/loader.conf file:

hw.bge.allow_asf="1"

Now, reboot your server, and the eLOM interface should now be responding again.

FreeBSD on Fujitsu Blade Servers

FreeBSD works without any issues on Fujitsu blade servers. You can either choose to use the hardware RAID controller or use software RAID in FreeBSD, depending on which option you prefer.

FreeBSD on SuperMicro Blade Servers

The FreeBSD mps driver, which is required by the RAID controller used in these blades, does currently not support the IR (Integrated RAID) firmware which the controllers are fitted with. Until that changes it will not be possible to install FreeBSD on these servers.

Access FreeBSD File Systems from the Recovery Tool

From your Control Center, you can load our "Tools for Free/Open BSD" recovery tool, which has enabled write support for UFS file systems.

Once started, you can run the following commands which will mount the file system with write access. Note that you should change the device and mount path to the correct partition and an empty directory.

mount -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd,rw /dev/sda5 /mnt/hd
mount -t ufs -o remount,rw /dev/sda5 /mnt/hd