From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Feb 10 00:44:39 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id AAA27882 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 10 Feb 1996 00:44:39 -0800 (PST) Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA27877 for ; Sat, 10 Feb 1996 00:44:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from msmith@localhost by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.6.12/8.6.9) id TAA25424; Sat, 10 Feb 1996 19:14:12 +1030 From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199602100844.TAA25424@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: Unexplained segfaults in 2.1.0-RELEASE To: licau@ebs06.eb.uah.edu (Luis Verissimo) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 1996 19:14:12 +1030 (CST) Cc: pascal@pascal.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: from "Luis Verissimo" at Feb 9, 96 10:59:15 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Luis Verissimo stands accused of saying: > > I have a 486DX4-100 machine running FreeBSD-2.1R. I experienced the same > problems. I had to disable both the internal and external caches, of my > machine. It then worked find. > > I have another 486DX2-66 older machine, that keeps getting those signals, > even with both caches disabled. > > Can anybody tell me where is the list of machines that are currently > running FreeBSD with no problems? This is (obviously, if you actually think about it for a second) a totally impossible question. Let's see, there are perhaps something of the order of a hundred or so distinct CPU variants that can run FreeBSD. Perhaps a thousand or so major motherboard chipsets, several tens of significantly different disk controllers, several hundred different video cards and so on. Now take each number, one after another, and multiply them all together. This is the total number of possible PC configurations that there are. Let's assume that we were to build one of each of these hundred million or so combinations, and do a 'make world' on each to check them. If we assume that the systems are reasonably fast (not all true 8) this will take perhaps 10 hours each. So now we have a billion testing hours required, or 114,000 testing-years. Do you understand yet why what you ask is impossible? Now, if you said "this is my hardware", and listed everything you have, including the CPU manufacturer and motherboard chipset, it's possible that someone will know something, and will tell you. If not, you can add your two systems to the grouop that FreeBSD does _not_ work on due to fundamental hardware problems. However, it could just be that you have faulty memory, and your motherboard is actually fine, or your CPU could be faulty... > Luis Verissimo -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] "wherever you go, there you are" - Buckaroo Banzai [[