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Date:      Sun, 21 May 1995 13:29:05 -0700 (PDT)
From:      "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>
To:        tege@cygnus.com (Torbjorn Granlund)
Cc:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: MAJOR problem with FreeBSD-2.0-RELEASE
Message-ID:  <199505212029.NAA03831@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>
In-Reply-To: <199505212021.NAA25309@cygnus.com> from "Torbjorn Granlund" at May 21, 95 01:21:26 pm

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> 
>   If this is the Intel Zappa board, make sure you are using TIN connectors
>   on the SIMM modules, if they are gold you may have a very serious memory
>   system problem.  (The data book that came with your Zappa board will
>   say to use only Tin SIMM modules, believe it!!!).
> 
> The SIMMs have tin connectors.

Okay, good!

>   This really smells like memory system problems.  Are you running a 90Mhz
>   or 100Mhz CPU??  The Zappa board is not rated for 100Mhz operation (or
>   at least the 2 board I looked at clearly stated 75 or 90Mhz but not 
>   100 Mhz.)
> 
> I use a 90 MHz CPU.  (Becasue of the 20ns SRAMs I didn't dare to set the
> jumpers for a 66 MHz external clock rate.)

That is why the board is rate for 90Mhz, and even then they have to
be pushing the limits a little.  All the other boards I use have 15nS
cache chips, this is the first 90Mhz board I have seen with 20nS chips
in it :-(.
 
>   > Another problem is the driver for the buslogic card (bt742.c?).  It doesn't
>   > do synchronuous SCSI with my Buslogic KT-946C.  I cannot get to
>   > ftp.cdrom.com, so I cannot check if the driver is improved.  Is it?
> 
>   Humm.. been running bt946's in sync mode for over a year, what version
>   of the board/BIOS/firmware do you have?
> 
> I don't remember, but the card is brand new.  (I'll check the version in a
> bit.)

Brand new means little with Bus Logic, and the time it takes for new versions
of the board to trickly through the distribution channel.  I have found my
old versions of the cards to actually work better then the newer versions!!
[Just ask Jordan, he had a nightmare with the latest version of cards from
Bus Logic, so have I, basically can't get the d*mn things to work with
several of my newer motherboards, and due to lack of Bus Logic's technical
support have shit canned the whole product line :-(]

>   Do you have the sync options enabled on the bt946C?
> 
> They are enabled correctly.  And the BIOS recognizes that the drive is
> capable of synchronuous transfers!

But then reports to FreeBSD that the board is in async mode, seems we
had someone else with this problem, seems BL has changed a bit definition
on us :-(.

>   > Note that we observed the exact same behaviour when using FreeBSD 2.0 on
>   > a completely different system (different CPU, motherboard, disks, SCSI
>   > card) .  This makes it unlikely to be hardware problems.
> 
>   Ahh... FreeBSD 2.0, been a long time since I've run it, could very well
>   be problems in that release.  Though I have run make world using it
>   to upgrade a system to 2.0 current back in February (initial boot strapping
>   of my build environment here after being gone for some time).  That was
>   run on a Opti based P54C-90 with a BT946C and 16MB, would not have seen
>   a bounce buffer bug :-(.
> 
> Could you possibly make a newer kernel that I can try?

Could, but it will have lots of problems with 2.0 binaries, especially
networking code.  You could also grab the kernel from freefall, or
grab the 950412 snap floppies and get a kernel from there.  These
will all have 2.0R compatibility problems, but at least it should be
more stable.


-- 
Rod Grimes                                      rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com
Accurate Automation Company                   Custom computers for FreeBSD



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