Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 01:16:46 -0700 From: Jonathan Dama <jd@caltech.edu> To: amd64@freebsd.org Subject: [update] 8GB issues, Tyan 2885 K8W Message-ID: <20050419081646.GD37497@philemon.caltech.edu>
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Several times in the past people have mentioned issues with 8GB of RAM on the Tyan 2885 K8W (including myself). Tyan recently posted a BIOS update (version 2.04) which corrects some issues in earlier BIOSs improperly computing memory timings. To summarize, I had experienced two issues: 1) I had observed panics under minimal load with 8GB with the BIOS autoconfiguring the memory speed. These problems were correctable by manually degrading the RAM speed as was possible with the 2.02 BIOS. Interestingly, memtest86+ did not report issues with the autoconfigured settings. But this perhaps is not surprising because evidence is that timings were marginal--some sticks of memory would work others wouldn't. e.g., I'd see situations were CPU0 seems to handle the 4 stick load but not CPU1. This of course is sensible due to component variation in a marginal configuration. The 2.04 BIOS now properly automatically configures to stable memory settings. *Note the route of this is that you can get to 8GB using 4 double-stacked DIMMs per CPU. We got into a very confusing situation because both single (double density) and double-stacked DIMMs had been purchased and our techs weren't communicating or paying attention to that in their problem reports. 2) The second problem involves the onboard broadcom and silicon images chipset. This problem has only manifested itself under heavy combinations of network and disk access. Unfortunately, I've never gotten a good crash-dump and the problem is hard to reproduce. I do not see similar issues with the em, ahc drivers. Nor did I see similar issues with the broadcom and si hardware under linux I hope this commentary is useful to people. I apologize for not having anything definite to report on #2. But the take away is that nothing is intrinsically wrong with FreeBSD 5-Stable on Tyan K8W (S2885) with 8GB--though something might be lurking in the onboard peripherals. -Jon
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