Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:30:37 -0700 From: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> To: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@freebsd.org> Cc: FreeBSD-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Problems with AMD64 and 8 GB RAM? Message-ID: <424B288D.80303@samsco.org> In-Reply-To: <20050330222439.GU84137@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20050330222439.GU84137@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > I've recently acquired an AMD64 box (dual Opteron 242, SiS Master@-FAR > motherboard > (http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/server/svr/pro_svr_detail.php?UID=484). > See below for more details). I find it very unstable running with 8 > GB memory, though 4 GB are not a problem. At first I thought it was > the onboard peripherals, but after disabling them it still persisted. > > What's unstable? I only once got it through the boot process. > Running a 5.3-RELEASE i386 kernel it panics, though I haven't > investigated the panic (yet), since I'm not interested in the i386 > kernel. The amd64 5.4-PRERELEASE kernel just hangs/freezes. When the > peripherals are enabled, it's after probing the onboard NIC (bge) and > before probing SATA (no drives present). I've done a verbose boot, of > course, but no additional information is present. The NIC is > recognized, and that's all. > > Without the peripherals, but with a 3Com 3c905 PCI NIC, it continues > beyond this point, but doesn't enable the NIC. I don't have dmesg > output for these attempts, so I can't produce the exact message, and I > suspect it's not important. It continues until trying to mount NFS > file systems, where it hangs for obvious reasons. Pressing ^C causes > the system to either panic (and be unable to dump because I don't have > that much swap) or just hang. > > None of these problems occur when I use 4 GB memory. About the only > strangeness, which seems to come from the BIOS, is that it recognizes > only 3.5 GB. If I put all DIMMS in, it recognizes the full 8 GB > memory. > > I realize that this isn't enough to diagnose the problem. The reason > for this message now is to ask: > > 1. Has anybody else seen this problem? > 2. Has anybody else used this hardware configuration and *not* seen > this problem? > 3. Where should I look next? > > I'm attaching the (non-verbose) dmesg from a successful boot. > > Greg > -- > See complete headers for address and phone numbers. > 5.3-RELEASE has a lot of problems with >4GB due to busdma issues. Those should no longer be an issue in RELENG_5, including 5.4-PRE. You'll need to dig in and provide some more details, I guess. I have an HDAMA dual Opteron system that behaves fine now with 8GB of RAM, so your problem might lie with particular hardware and/or drivers. Scott
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