From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Oct 5 15:39:17 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from inet03.citec.qld.gov.au (inet03.citec.qld.gov.au [203.5.10.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4655D15689 for ; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 15:39:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sgcccdc@citec.qld.gov.au) Received: by inet03.citec.qld.gov.au; id IAA04616; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 08:38:35 +1000 (EST) Received: from guru.citec.qld.gov.au( 147.132.20.47) by inet03.citec.qld.gov.au via smap (V2.0) id xma004388; Wed, 6 Oct 99 08:38:21 +1000 Received: from localhost (sgcccdc@localhost) by guru.citec.qld.gov.au (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id IAA16766 for ; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 08:38:23 +1000 X-Authentication-Warning: guru.citec.qld.gov.au: sgcccdc owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 08:38:23 +1000 (EST) From: Colin Campbell To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: freebsd v bsdi v linux Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, Had an interesting installtion problem that has just been solved. Machine is a PIII 450 with 512MB (4x128)RAM. During installation of 3.2 from the WC CD I'd get a wite failure or a panic of the machine or both. With 3.3 using NFS I just got a machine panic. These always happened during the bin dist unpacking. I tried RedHat 6.0 and the system panicked half way through the installation. The machine came with BSDI 3.1 on it. When I booted it for the first time I noticed that the system was reporting only 128MB RAM. Just BSDI weirdness I thought. Despite the repeated FreeBSD and Linux failures I was always able to install BSDI, but the system always reported 128MB RAM. Nothing dawned on me from this. Anyway, I started pulling DIMMs from the box. With only slot 1 occupied FreeBSD installed no problems. I pulled that DIMM and put two others in. No problems. Added the first one to give 384MB, no problems. Put the untested DIMM in and the machine wouldn't even boot! Hmm bad memory! To test a theory I then installed BSDI 3.1 again. Interestingly it now reported 384MB RAM. This now leads me to my question: What is BSDI doing that made it recognise the bad memory in slot 2, and hence only work with the first 128MB, that Linux and more importantly FreeBSD are NOT doing? Anyone think it's a useful enough feature to be added to the system? It measn that if you think you have xMB and the OS comes up with yMB you might have a problem. Colin -- Colin Campbell Unix Support/Postmaster/Hostmaster CITEC +61 7 3227 7112 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message