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Date:      Tue, 07 Jan 1997 15:12:39 -0800
From:      Fred Gilham <gilham@csl.sri.com>
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: New motherboard breaks tape drive 
Message-ID:  <199701072312.PAA26734@impulse.csl.sri.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 06 Jan 1997 17:04:06 CST." <199701062304.XAA10197@right.PCS> 

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Jonathan Lemon writes:
----------------------------------------
Heh.  When I bought my EISA machine about 4 years back, I was worried
that their motherboard wouldn't be able to cache any memory above 16M.
So I called them up and asked them how many address lines they had
going to their tag cache - nobody in their tech department could even
answer my question.  So I finally had them fax over the damned
schematics and looked at them myself.

Incompetents, sigh.  (Yes, they only had 24 address lines, and I
wanted to put in 32M back then).
----------------------------------------

I went through something like this.  I have an EISA/VLB motherboard; I
think it's a NICE motherboard but it has a SiS chipset.  I tried to
upgrade it from 16 to 32M.  FreeBSD crashed every time, fairly
quickly, with or without cache turned on.  Windows 95 seemed to run
OK, so at first I thought it was one of those `FreeBSD works the
memory system harder' kind of problems---until I purposely tried
loading lots of applications at the same time under Windows 95,
whereupon I finally got it to crash there too.  (In the meantime I
discovered that Windows 95 slows down on a per-application-loaded
basis, even if the applications are not doing anything.)  Sometimes it
gave memory parity errors but sometimes it just locked up.

I finally got a running system by turning off parity checks on memory.
It's been solid ever since, though I shudder to think what will happen
if the memory fails.

-Fred Gilham    gilham@csl.sri.com



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