From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Dec 19 8:59:41 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7F70E37B417 for ; Wed, 19 Dec 2001 08:59:37 -0800 (PST) Received: from vcmr-19.rcs.rpi.edu (vcmr-19.rcs.rpi.edu [128.113.113.12]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id fBJGxZq80162; Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:59:35 -0500 Received: from localhost (lansil@localhost) by vcmr-19.rcs.rpi.edu (8.8.5/8.8.6) with SMTP id LAA50150; Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:59:35 -0500 X-Authentication-Warning: vcmr-19.rcs.rpi.edu: lansil owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:59:35 -0500 (EST) From: "Lawrence S. Lansing" X-Sender: lansil@vcmr-19.rcs.rpi.edu Reply-To: "Lawrence S. Lansing" To: Rick Bischoff Cc: stable-digest Subject: Re: S2460 problems In-Reply-To: <1781377234.20011219092142@rickjr.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > I have a S2460 Tyan Tiger motherboard > However, when I installed FreeBSD onto either drive, the entire > system hard locks at random times. I experienced similar problems with my system. I'm running a Tyan S2462 motherboard, dual 1200 MHz MP athlons, 1 gig of reg. ecc RAM, SB Live value, Nvidia TNT2 Ultra, on-board dual-channel SCSI, on-board video. I believe I'm still running tyan's original BIOS release...and definitely not the latest, at any rate. The symptoms for me: the system would lock up *when idle*. Generally, I'd walk away from my computer for a minute, and I would come back to see the console screen-saver frozen. No amount of coaxing would revive the system. No kernel-panic or other useful error information. I experienced these symptoms from the time I built my system (4.3-stable, maybe 4.3-release) to 4.4-release. Somewhere along the 4.4-stable branch, the problem was apparently fixed, and my machine is now rock-solid, after a build/installworld. When I say the system locked up "when idle", I mean that I was able to keep the system from crashing by maintaining a CPU load. With bash, I would do something like : "cat /dev/null&;cat /dev/null&" The resulting two processes would keep both CPUs occupied...and the machine would be perfectly stable, even when left in this state for hours on end. I was able to build/installworld on the system to upgrade, without any stability problems. Another reliable way to prevent the crashes was to disable SMP in the kernel. With a uniprocessor kernel, the lockups *did not happen*. At first I suspected a hardware issue. I yanked most of my hardware, with the exception of the video card. I know the soundcard was not the problem. The only thing I did not pull (and should have) was the video card. In short, if you're not running the latest 4.4-stable, I suggest you upgrade. I would be interested in hearing if maintaining a load on the system (or using a uniprocessor kernel) keeps the machine from crashing--it would give me peace of mind to know that I am not suffering from any hardware problems. I hope this helps. -Larry Lansing To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message