Date: Fri, 3 Feb 95 0:03:18 MET From: sos@login.dknet.dk (S|ren Schmidt) To: kaleb@x.org (Kaleb Keithley) Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: I'm having a very perplexing problem Message-ID: <9502022303.AA12315@login.dknet.dk> In-Reply-To: <9502022241.AA06393@fedora.x.org>; from "Kaleb Keithley" at Feb 2, 95 5:41 pm
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It does sound very much like a memory problem, besides 100ns RAM
is way to slow for a modern machine, 70na is more like it. It
could also suggest you are having bad cache RAM chips, or at
least some that are not fast enough.
> In the process of juggling some memory between systems I managed to
> kill the motherboard in my FreeBSD (1.1.5.1) system. After replacing
> the motherboard began to get some programs, that never had a problem
> before, now segv apparently at random, e.g. /bin/sh, /sbin/fsck,
> and gcc's cc1.
>
> What's strange is that fsck would check /dev/rswd0a fine, but segv
> on /dev/rswd0e (my /usr partition). More recently I went to rebuild
> my kernel, and gcc runs fine, but cc1 segvs repeatedly when it tries
> to compile rtsock.c.
>
> I was able to boot single user, remount my root partition, and replace
> /bin/sh and /sbin/fsck with the versions from the kernel or cpio
> install diskette. The replacements don't dump core. (And I know that
> they're not the same as the "real" /bin/sh and /sbin/fsck.) Replacing
> gcc's cc1 is more problematic only because I had installed 2.6.3 at one
> point. I can of course revert to the 2.5.8 files that were originally
> installed.
>
> One thought I had was that I had 70ns RAM in one bank and 100ns RAM
> in the second bank. (I used to have 16 meg, but this new board only has
> room for 8 SIMMs. :-() Thinking that this might somehow be the cause,
> I put 100ns RAM in all the slots. This was after discovering /bin/sh
> and /sbin/fsck were "bad" but before discovering the problem with cc1,
> so I'm inclined to believe that it's not the memory speed difference
> that is what's causing the problem.
>
> Both boards are apparently from the same Taiwan motherboard company; same
> logo on the boxes anyway. The old board was a five year old ISA with an
> OPTI chipset and AMI BIOS. The new board is an ISA-VLB with a chipset I
> don't remember and Award BIOS. The old board had the ability to set memory
> wait states in the CMOS setup -- the new board does not.
>
> This "feels" like a memory problem, but I don't know why, for instance,
> one version of fsck would successfully fsck rwd0a but dump core on rwd0e,
> when it had worked fine before changing the motherboard; while another
> version of fsck on the new motherboard works fine on both partitions.
>
> Here's how my disk is partitioned:
>
> 6 partitions:
> # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg]
> a: 30240 164304 4.2BSD 512 4096 16 # (Cyl. 163 - 192)
> b: 68544 194544 swap # (Cyl. 193 - 260)
> c: 506016 164304 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 163 - 664)
> d: 671328 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 665)
> e: 387072 263088 4.2BSD 512 4096 16 # (Cyl. 261 - 644)
> f: 20160 650160 4.2BSD 512 4096 16 # (Cyl. 645 - 664)
>
> Any ideas?
>
> --
>
> Kaleb KEITHLEY
>
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Soren Schmidt (sos@FreeBSD.org | sos@login.dknet.dk) FreeBSD Core Team
So much code to hack -- so little time
..
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