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Date:      Tue, 5 Jan 1999 10:11:55 -0600 (CST)
From:      Guy Helmer <ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov>
To:        "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@plutotech.com>
Cc:        freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: ASUS P65UP5 Dual PPro problems
Message-ID:  <Pine.SGI.3.96.990105100936.20729D-100000@demios.scl.ameslab.gov>
In-Reply-To: <199901012114.OAA43959@panzer.plutotech.com>

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On Fri, 1 Jan 1999, Kenneth D. Merry wrote:

> Guy Helmer wrote...
> > We are having trouble with a bunch of ASUS P65UP5 machines with dual
> > 200MHz PPro's; each machine is configured exactly the same, with 256MB
> > RAM, a Tulip Fast Ethernet interface and IDE disk drive.  Symptoms are
> > that the machine will either freeze solid without any console message, or
> > (according to top(1)) a process is running on CPU1 (and never changes from
> > CPU1) but is not getting any CPU time (WCPU and CPU are both 0%).  This
> > seems to happen randomly, but usually when the processes are doing network
> > communication.
> > 
> > The kernel is FreeBSD SMP built from sources dated Nov 19 1998.  The
> > machine's BIOS is set to MP spec 1.4.  The machines work fine under
> > uniprocessor Linux 2.0.3x, but exhibit similar behavior with SMP Linux
> > 2.0.3x or 2.1.x.
> 
> Well, FWIW, I have the same sort of machine (same motherboard and
> processors), but running with -current from early December.  I haven't
> had any trouble.
> 
> I've got SCSI disks, though, not IDE.  I do have two DEC Tulip based SMC
> cards, though.
> 
> One question I have, though, is what kind of RAM you have in the machine?
> i.e., what configuration.  I tried putting 256MB in my machine, using 8
> 32MB (parity) SIMMs, but I wasn't able to keep it like that.  I got random
> NMIs with 8 SIMMs on board.  I reduced it to 6 SIMMs (192MB), and the NMIs
> stopped.

These machines have 256MB RAM using 8 32MB ECC SIMMs, ECC enabled in the
BIOS setup.

> I'm fairly certain they weren't parity errors, since I've had bad memory on
> other machines and FreeBSD would actually panic with a "ram parity error"
> NMI.  The NMI panic message I got with these errors didn't state a specific
> problem.
> 
> The SIMMs I have all have 24 chips on board, so they're within ASUS' stated
> specs, but my guess is that I exceeded the load that the memory subsystem
> could take.  The NMIs generally only occurred under high memory load.

Are the NMI's reported via syslog?  We've not seen any NMIs reported to
the console on these systems...

Thanks,
Guy

Guy Helmer, Graduate Student, Iowa State University Dept. of Computer Science 
Research Assistant, Ames Laboratory       ---         ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov
Research Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science   ---   ghelmer@cs.iastate.edu
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~ghelmer


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