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Date:      Sat, 6 May 1995 19:44:38 -0400
From:      mtaylor@gateway.cybernet.com (Mark J. Taylor)
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   lance Ethernet and > 16 Mb RAM failure
Message-ID:  <v01520c02abd1b246ae43@[192.245.33.12]>

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Hi-

I'm installing 2.0-950412-SNAP on a new system.  I've never used the 'lnc'
ethernet drivers before, and I'm having difficulty getting them stable on a
system with more than 16 Mb of RAM.

The system is a Cyrix DX4/100 CPU with 32 Mb of RAM, on-board: IDE, floppy,
serial, parallel, flat-panel, VGA, PS/2 mouse, keyboard, and Network.  The
Network chip is a PCnet-ISA+ (Am79C961) which I guess uses the 'lnc'
(NE2100 compatible) ethernet drivers.  I've got it set for I/O address
0x300 (port 0x300) and DMA channel 5 (DRQ 5).

Everything is fine with only 16 Mb of RAM installed (1 SIMM, 12 chips, 70
nsec).  When I put the other RAM SIMM in, the system gets to the point of
starting 'sendmail' and never finishes it.  If I ^C to continue on, the
system will sometimes:
  1) hang at the point of loading the IBCS2 emulation stuff
  2) panic immediately, with random panics (never the same panic message)
  3) spontaneously reboot some short time in the future
(I've seen sendmail hang this way before when the network is 'acting up',
like when your not connected to the net...)

Everything is fine if I use a PC-104 based NE2000 clone card (using the
'ed' driver), even with 32 Mb of RAM installed.  This is what I used to do
the installation from, so I could generate a kernel without all of the
devices that I don't need.

I've tried a few things, including booting with each SIMM in a 16 Mb
configuration (too determine if the SIMM was bad).  BTW- there is no cache
installed on this machine, and it uses a Phoenix BIOS.  I've also tried the
system at 75 Mhz (using a 25 MHz clock instead of a 33 Mhz clock).  I've
played a little with DMA timings and 8/16 bit I/O delays.  Nothing seems to
help.

Help?  Need more info?  Should I compile a kernel with ddb?

(Note: I've installed about a dozen 1.x systems, and this'll be my 3rd 2.x
system.  I'm extremely appreciative of all of those who've contributed to
the FreeBSD project.  :)   I'm comitted to making it the OS of choice for
those who must have 'UNIX' machines.)


-Mark Taylor
mtaylor@cybernet.com





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