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E5640 processor causing errors

idata
Employee
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I support a goup of users who have just upgraded their old HP operton based workstations to HP Z800's with E5640 westmere processors. Running Redhat Enterprise Linux 6.1 (had to go latest and greatest to get the latest and greatest network cards working).

2 applications that used to work on old WS running RHEL 5.4 now fail. One with a SEGFLT, the other with random results.

The SGFLTing application was then discovered to be working on the old Opteron system after it had been upgraded to RHEL 6.1. The random results application also works on the upgraded Opteron system.

Further testing by some others in my organisation have show the SEGFLTing app to work on a Nehelam processorrunning RHEL6.1 and fail on another westmere processor.

I have turning off hyperthreading in BIOS and application still fails. I have flashed the BIOS to latest HP version (released Sept 11) and it still fails. I have upgraded to latest linux kernel and glibs and it still fails.

Both applications I don't have full source code for and can't recompile. The fact that it runs on the same OS and kernel level on a different processor type, points towards the E5640.

Anything anybody can suggest I try, happy to hear from you.

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Adolfo_S_Intel2
Employee
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I would suggest contacting the software developers for hardware compatibility requirements. Keep in mind that Intel processors are software independent, however the software might need specific hardware configuration in order to works properly, this is the reason that the software developer is the one that performs all the compatibility tests to determine the best hardware configuration for their systems.

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idata
Employee
516 Views

Thank you for the response. Unfortunately as I mentioned in the original post, I do not have the source code for the applications (which unfortunately were inhouse developed years ago.).

I was trying to document the issue I was having hoping someone may have had a similar problem (and hopefuly had a solution). The fact it runs on a Nehalem processor but not the Westmere, took the issue way beyond my technical level of expertise.

We're now looking at having to resurrect older workstations to get my users working, but don't want to have to tell them they wasted their money on the new ones.

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DSilv11
Valued Contributor III
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You might check BIOS set-up to see if you can force single core operation as a test

Some software can have concurrency bugs which will only show up in high speed, mutli-threaded processors.

I am a hardware guy so not a expert by any means. I reviewed a presentation from http://www.corensic.com/ http://www.corensic.com/ this week on some debug software for app developers which was very interesting. (too bad I don't do software )

With the E5640 your getting about as fast as you can get.

Another option might be to set up a virtulized workstation on the new system to deal with the older software?

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