Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 09:18:51 -0700 (MST) From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@plutotech.com> To: ghelmer@scl.ameslab.gov (Guy Helmer) Cc: freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ASUS P65UP5 Dual PPro problems Message-ID: <199901051618.JAA64014@panzer.plutotech.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.3.96.990105100936.20729D-100000@demios.scl.ameslab.gov> from Guy Helmer at "Jan 5, 99 10:11:55 am"
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Guy Helmer wrote... > 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've heard (on one of the FreeBSD lists, probably -hardware, I think) that enabling ECC knocks about 10% off memory performance. It might be better to just enable parity checking. > > 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... NMI == Non Maskable Interrupt NMI's cause panics. If you've got DDB enabled, you can just continue on after an NMI, but you may have weird things happen. Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@plutotech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
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