Intel Atom C2000 chips can potentially brick(!) your system?

[Scharbauer]

Hello

I'm currently planning on putting together a server, I thought on using some supermicro board (which commonly features a Intel Atom processor).
However, a few days ago I catched this story on Slashdot describing that some Intel Atom processors suffer from a rare, serious, issue which results in the the processor becoming entirely bricked.

https://slashdot.org/story/17/02/07...icking-products----and-its-not-just-cisco-hit

Article linked to from slashdot:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_to_link_product_warning_to_faulty_chip/

What do you think of this?
I suppose it would be best to avoid purchasing any Intel Atom processor-based system until this issue is resolved?

 

[Piers Dawson-Damer]

I pinged ixsystems and pfsense on this four days ago and have yet to hear anything. Probably they are gagged by NDAs with Intel. The Register indicates, the following CPUs are effected;
C2308, C2338, C2350, C2358, C2508, C2518, C2530, C2538, C2550, C2558, C2718, C2730, C2738, C2750, and C2758.

My FreeNAS XL use the C2750, and the pFsense gateways utilise the C2558

Supposedly it can take 18 months for the failures to manifest.

____
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_to_link_product_warning_to_faulty_chip/

 

[Piers Dawson-Damer]

..as for are they any good from a performance perspective?

In a fairly real-world test (possibly otherwise known as pseudo-science), I brought a FreeNAS XL up to sync with a Synology, over 10GbaseT, with a verity of protocols, including Resilio, Rsync, SMB.

Cannot remember specifics about each particular protocol, but routinely saw 1200MBs. Both machines utilise SSD cache, but the Synology uses a bastardised implementation of btrfs. The Synology a Pentium-D 4GB memory, 10 x HGST 7K disks. The iXsystems FreeNAS box, 32GB memory, 8 x HGST 7K spindles of rust. Quite happy.

Really looking forward to maturity of FreeNAS 10, and testing the bhyve virtualisation, especially alongside etcd and IPFS. Being able to virtualise a pfSense distributed load-balancer, using CARP/VRRP, on each Atom hypervisor.. it kinda blows the mind.

Instead of using one of each; gateway wifi-router, NAS box, NVR box; we would easily, and quietly be able to use multiple machines, discreetly distributed throughout a building, each participating in the load balancing, sharing of DBs and port forwarding of to ephemeral service endpoints, such as a Resilio node.

Now just, as you suggest, wait for some news on the Atoms

 

[Ericloewe]

This is the fourth thread or so, so I'm locking it. Discuss this in the existing thread here:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...s-system-fault-may-lead-to-dead-system.50314/

Additionally, this section is to discuss builds for FreeNAS servers, not other hardware matters.