Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 22:09:41 -0600 (MDT) From: "Tyson N. Trebesch" <trebesch@mcn.net> To: Rich Wales <richw@webcom.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Memory sizing, AGP video card Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0008172202030.88274-100000@mazer.mcn.net> In-Reply-To: <200008172087162.richw@wyattearp.stanford.edu>
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As a side note: I've never had very good luck with Dell OptiPlex GXfoo-type boxes. The CS Department I did systems work for had some, as did a Multimedia Lab I worked for, and the OptiPlex series tended to be problematic because of all the on-board devices like ethernet cards, video cards, and sound cards. Separately, I've seen FreeBSD 3.4 and 4.0 both kernel panic due to problems relating to video RAM that was shared with the main system RAM. I don't have the exact error message, but it looked like somehow the system was trying to make video writes to system RAM or vice versa, as the kernel panicked with a wierd kind of kernel memory structure error, as far as I could tell. That manifested itself as wierd userland reboots, especially when the system was loaded heavily. > I just installed 4.1-RELEASE on a Dell OptiPlex GX300. This system > has (amongst other things) 128 MB of ECC RAM, and an "NVidia Riva Ultra > Vanta TNT2 graphics accelerator" AGP video card. > > The documentation from Dell claims the video card has 32 MB of memory, > but the card doesn't appear to have any on-board memory, so I suspect > it's really using the top 32 MB of the system's RAM. > > When I first tried bringing up 3.5-RELEASE on this machine, it kept > hanging during boot (locked up immediately after outputting the copy- > right banners). After a lot of fiddling, I finally got it to boot > by limiting memory size to 96 MB (via the older kludge of specifying > "iosiz 98304" on the "device npx0" configuration line). Anything > larger than 96 MB, and it would hang during boot. I went to another computer. However, I suspect that simply using a different video adapter (both of these options are probably less than ideal for you) may have alleviated the problem. Just my two cents. Crappy hardware, as I see it. -Tyson To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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