Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 17:16:29 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: New motherboard breaks tape drive Message-ID: <199701080016.RAA15256@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199701072312.PAA26734@impulse.csl.sri.com> from "Fred Gilham" at Jan 7, 97 03:12:39 pm
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> 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, I believe you will find that your Windows95 is not run bus mastering DMA for its disk drivers, but doing programmed I/O (a cute name to avoid the words "buzz loop on a status register using the main processor") for your particular disk controller. The problem with the motherboard is only evident with EISA bus master devices and driver written to run them in bus mastering mode. You should go back to 16M, compile the kernel with bounce buffers enabled, and reinstall the other 16M. > 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. This is a seperate problem. Most likely, you are running with the board jumpered for too few wait states and are using 70ns or slower memory. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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