Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:27:40 -0500 (CDT) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: BSD <bsd@shell-server.com> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Constant panics on 4.1-STABLE! Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0009210906190.27801-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10009201959480.20731-100000@marvin.shell-server.com>
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On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, BSD wrote: > On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Chris Dillon wrote: > > I hate to tell you this, but this is most certainly a memory problem. > > Get some memory that has been tested and approved by your motherboard > > manufacturer for that board, and to be double-sure, make it ECC memory > > and then enable ECC in the motherboard's BIOS. If you STILL have > > problems after that, then you can start blaming the problem on > > something else. The ONLY other time I have had problems like this is > > when overclocking the processor. You aren't overclocking those > > processors are you? > > Are you saying all 3 sticks are bad at 133MHz (KA7) and one > or more is bad at 66MHz (BP6)? The likelihood of that is > extremely small. You said you were running a PIII on that BP6. Therefore, you would have to be running it at either 100MHz or 133MHz (which the BX doesn't officially support, but it works pretty well anyway). Also, it might not be that the memory is bad, but just out of spec for your systems. For example, if your system is expecting RAM that it can use CAS2 timings with but you have CAS3 RAM, that is going to cause problems. If this is the case, the EEPROMs on the sticks might be programmed with incorrect timing information. Tell your systems to ignore the EEPROM (SPD), and try manually setting the most conservative memory timings you can in each of your systems. > Also, a 512MB stick of RAM would cost me $1,600CAD. Sigh. > That's not going to happen anytime soon. Furthermore, I stress > tested each stick of RAM, with make -j64 buildworld. Nothing > failed there. The panics happenned when the system was just doing > its normal tasks. I'll try to post more detailed reports > (including crash dumps). A 'make world' is a pretty good way to stress-test things, but its far from perfect. I've had flaky systems survive multiple 'make world' sessions but still fail unexpectedly at other times. BTW, crash dumps will be meaningless if this really is a hardware problem. These kinds of problems are exactly why I spend the few extra bucks to buy ECC RAM for my important systems, even my workstation at home. Its worth it. If I have problems and I have ECC enabled, I can be fairly sure it isn't the RAM. Usually I just enable EC (Error-checking only) on my system at home, so if I start getting a lot of NMI panics I know that my memory is starting to flake out on me, at which point I can turn on ECC and start shopping for new memory. So far, I've never gotten one. This is probably due to me running PC133 memory on only a 66MHz bus. :-) -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For Intel x86 and Alpha architectures. ( http://www.freebsd.org ) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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