From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu Oct  7 21:56: 9 1999
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To: sa-list@avantgo.com
Cc: FreeBSD-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, FreeBSD-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: SMP + fxp0 wierdness 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 07 Oct 1999 16:58:09 PDT."
             <37FD3391.1F84611A@avantgo.com> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 21:54:57 -0700
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>We're running 3.3-REL on dual processor PII-450's, with a N440BX
>motherboard, using the onboard EtherExpress Pro (fxp) NIC and 512MB RAM.
>
>These machines are running custom software that excercises the disk, CPU
>and network quite heavily.  The SMP machines seem to have both "fxp0:
>device timeout" problems, and spontaneous reboots.  We were uable to get
>a working savecore until now, and have traced the reboots back to the
>fxp driver as well.  Here are the debug outputs, and any custom changes
>to our kernel config.
>
>Could this be a problem with SMP + fxp combination?  Any other thoughts
>or ideas?  
>
>We've serached, and read, and searched all the FAQ's for both of these
>problems, and have pretty well come up empty.  Suggestions for the next
>course of action?
>
>Thanks in advance for anyones help.

   There is some kind of hardware problem with the Intel N440BX motherboard
that is causing memory corruption during the DMA. This is the third nearly
identical report I've gotten about it. It does not appear to be a FreeBSD
bug and so far only occurs when using the N440BX. You might try messing with
the BIOS options and see if changing any of the DMA related settings will
make the problem go away...I'd be very interested in the results.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org
Creator of high-performance Internet servers - http://www.terasolutions.com
Pave the road of life with opportunities.


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