Dell R510 BIOS Settings

[EarthBoundX5]

I'm setting up 2x Dell R510s for FreeNAS, and a few BIOS settings caught my eye. I couldn't find anything substantial after 5-10 mins of searching, and figured someone here might know. Here they each are with various blurbs from the manual.

Processor Settings -> Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch
Enables high utilization of sequential memory access.
NOTE: Disable this option for applications that require
high utilization of random memory access.

I'm inclined to believe I should disable this, as FreeNAS / ZFS like to use memory? It's enabled by default.

Processor Settings -> Hardware Prefetcher
Enables or disables the hardware prefetcher.

I'd have passed this up, if I didn't notice the Note about the previous prefetch option.

Integrated Devices -> OS Watchdog Timer
Sets a timer to monitor the operating system for activity,
and aids in recovery if the system stops responding.
When Enabled, the operating system is allowed
to initialize the timer. When Disabled, the timer is
not initialized.
NOTE: This feature is usable only with operating systems
that support WDAT implementations of the Advanced
Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) 3.0b specification.

There are posts about this causing reboots in older FreeNAS versions. Is there any current details on this? I'm leaning towards keeping it Disabled, but could it be helpful to FreeNAS in some way?

Integrated Devices -> I/OAT DMA Engine
Enables or disables the I/O acceleration technology
(I/OAT). This feature should only be enabled if the
hardware and software support I/OAT.

I/O acceleration seems like another no brainer? But I am not familiar enough to know if this is a thing that would interfere with ZFS or not?


Apart from these above, I'm adusting the following as well. In case someone has a good reason against.

Processor Settings -> Logical Processor - Enabled
Processor Settings -> Virtualization Technology - Enabled
Processor Settings -> C States - Enabled

 

[dlavigne]

Did you decide to try any of the settings? If so, what were your results?

 

[EarthBoundX5]

Did you decide to try any of the settings? If so, what were your results?

No, I've not gotten there yet. Been stress testing the hardware and deciding on best RAIDZ config for primary and backup. Today will be the day though, so if no one has answers to these, I can look at doing some testing? Is there any preferred baseline...or just copy file of same size + timer? Repeat.

Also, I didn't list it as a BIOS option, but I guess there is debate as to whether or not Hyper Threading is useful or detrimental...but it's all 6+ years ago.