From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Jul 27 16:29:05 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA27623 for questions-outgoing; Sun, 27 Jul 1997 16:29:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fly.HiWAAY.net (root@fly.HiWAAY.net [208.147.154.56]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA27528 for ; Sun, 27 Jul 1997 16:27:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nexgen.hiwaay.net by fly.HiWAAY.net; (8.8.6/1.1.8.2/21Sep95-1003PM) id SAA12575; Sun, 27 Jul 1997 18:27:18 -0500 (CDT) Received: from nexgen (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by nexgen.hiwaay.net (8.8.6/8.8.4) with ESMTP id SAA00572 for ; Sun, 27 Jul 1997 18:27:15 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <199707272327.SAA00572@nexgen.hiwaay.net> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0zeta 7/24/97 To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: What does a parity error look like? From: dkelly@HiWAAY.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 27 Jul 1997 18:27:11 -0500 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk I have a non-FPU NexGen PCI-90 with parity memory and the NexGen MB supports parity memory. But the last month or so I've had system crashes under FreeBSD (don't run anything else). And wonder what a parity error would look like? What has been happening is when running X, I'd click a button in exmh or similar in Netscape. Usually something that would cause a bit of disk activity. But the mouse freezes. And 15 or 20 seconds later the system reboots. No error messages on the screen. No beeps. No kernel crashdump. Its as if the system clock had stopped and a watchdog reset the system. Agressive net surfing in Netscape 3.01 will trigger the problem. Opening a new window for each link seems to cause this to happen earlier. Last night I left a "make world" running in single user mode when I went to bed. Found out this morning via uptime the system rebooted about 2:30AM. So the problem is probably not due to X. System is a NexGen Nx586 P90 with PCI. Mach32 video. Adaptec 2940 with BIOS rev 1.10. An ATAPI CDROM, HD and tape are SCSI. An STB 4-com is on IRQ 12. An NE2000 clone is at the standard ed0 parameters but only a terminator is connected to its port. This hardware has run continuously the past 18 months or so without any crashes. The problem started about the time I cut down from 48M to 32M of memory by removing two 8M SIMMs. Am also wondering as I have 64M of swap configured, exactly twice my core. Have noticed sysinstall never creates a clean multiple size of core for swap. Should I add a swap file to make it bigger and break this multiple? Any good suggestions for memory test? It passes with pccheck-lite, which Amd/NexGen offers. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.