From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jan 7 15:14:07 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id PAA20146 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 7 Jan 1997 15:14:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from csla.csl.sri.com (csla.csl.sri.com [192.12.33.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP id PAA20137 for ; Tue, 7 Jan 1997 15:14:01 -0800 (PST) Received: from impulse.csl.sri.com (impulse.csl.sri.com [130.107.15.11]) by csla.csl.sri.com (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA20910 for ; Tue, 7 Jan 1997 15:10:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from impulse.csl.sri.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by impulse.csl.sri.com (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id PAA26734 for ; Tue, 7 Jan 1997 15:12:44 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <199701072312.PAA26734@impulse.csl.sri.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: New motherboard breaks tape drive In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 06 Jan 1997 17:04:06 CST." <199701062304.XAA10197@right.PCS> Date: Tue, 07 Jan 1997 15:12:39 -0800 From: Fred Gilham Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Jonathan Lemon writes: ---------------------------------------- Heh. When I bought my EISA machine about 4 years back, I was worried that their motherboard wouldn't be able to cache any memory above 16M. So I called them up and asked them how many address lines they had going to their tag cache - nobody in their tech department could even answer my question. So I finally had them fax over the damned schematics and looked at them myself. Incompetents, sigh. (Yes, they only had 24 address lines, and I wanted to put in 32M back then). ---------------------------------------- I went through something like this. I have an EISA/VLB motherboard; I think it's a NICE motherboard but it has a SiS chipset. I tried to upgrade it from 16 to 32M. FreeBSD crashed every time, fairly quickly, with or without cache turned on. Windows 95 seemed to run OK, so at first I thought it was one of those `FreeBSD works the memory system harder' kind of problems---until I purposely tried loading lots of applications at the same time under Windows 95, whereupon I finally got it to crash there too. (In the meantime I discovered that Windows 95 slows down on a per-application-loaded basis, even if the applications are not doing anything.) Sometimes it gave memory parity errors but sometimes it just locked up. I finally got a running system by turning off parity checks on memory. It's been solid ever since, though I shudder to think what will happen if the memory fails. -Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com